


Her Guys

by kyrieanne



Series: Her Guys [1]
Category: The Brave (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-03-10 07:46:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 69,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13497708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrieanne/pseuds/kyrieanne
Summary: They’re her guys.After Jaz says it aloud the words settle into a hollow within her that she hadn’t realized existed until then. At least, it wasn’t an emptiness she acknowledged to anyone but herself, and as much as she hated to admit it, the doc had been right. Saying it aloud helps, and the words once spoken can’t be unraveled.How Jaz & Dalton come to terms with their feelings, and how their found family is there every step along the way.





	1. Chapter 1

They’re her guys. 

 

After Jaz says it aloud the words settle into a hollow within her that she hadn’t realized existed until then. At least, it wasn’t an emptiness she acknowledged to anyone but herself, and as much as she hated to admit it, the doc had been right. Saying it aloud helps, and the words once spoken can’t be unraveled.  

 

They’re  _ her _ guys. 

 

When they return from Columbia she’s going through her equipment, methodically taking each piece apart and cleaning it, and she can practically feel Top’s eyes on the papers sitting next to her elbow there on the table. 

 

Their eyes meet and something in Jaz’s stomach flips. It’s her first indication that those words said aloud to Xander changed something, set a wrinkle, in her. It’s there and then it’s gone as Amir, McG, and Preach stagger in. Amir sits and scrubs his face with both hands.

 

“Time zones are a bitch,” McG says dropping his med bag on the floor. 

 

“Top, remember you promised barbeque,” Preach says as he sinks into a chair. 

 

Jaz glances at Dalton’s back. He’s leaned over his workstation, skimming something on his computer as if Columbia had been a warm-up for the next mission. His shoulders are straight and he doesn’t respond to Preach. 

 

Jaz tells herself that it’s nothing, that he’s not avoiding her, but they’ve been through this song and dance before. One of them crosses a line and it takes as long as it takes for things to smooth out. If he wanted to sulk then that was his problem. Xander cleared her. If Top had an issue that was about him. 

 

She wrinkles her nose, “You all stink.” 

 

“I call dibs on first shower,” McG pushes himself up. Amir and Preach follow and Jaz is left alone with Top. The only sounds are the quiet click as she reassembles her rifle and the distant shouts of the guys as they negotiate who gets a guaranteed hot shower. 

 

Then Dalton’s hand is at her elbow and he picks up her clearance papers. She stills. But he says nothing, and instead sinks down into a chair across from her and begins to hand her the pieces of her rifle. 

 

*** 

Adam grew up too soon. 

 

Even as a teenager he knew this was true. When he thirteen he carried his mother to the car and drove her to the ER one night after his old man had gotten particularly sloppy and taken it out on both of them. He was thirteen, too, when he realized that love makes people do foolish things because his mother drove them right back to that house and the rule of a man without conscience. So he waited. On his 18th birthday, he enrolled in the Army without looking back. There he was in basic training and even his CO noticed the way Adam always sat back, assessing, and carefully choosing his actions. 

 

“You need to learn to laugh, boy,” the older man said gruffly when he shook Adam’s hand at graduation. “You’ll be a fine soldier, but you gotta laugh. It’s the only thing that’ll keep you from crying.” 

 

It wasn’t until he ended up sitting next to Xander, trembling with rage and terrified by how good it felt, did Adam remember what his first CO had said about laughter. Laughter became the first rung he clung to as he made his way back to something resembling sanity. On bad days his only job had been to smile. With time it was to crack a joke while out on patrol, then to have a beer after, or finally Xander told him the work to do was to flirt with a pretty girl. 

 

“I don’t get what that has to do with the anger,” he’d said. 

 

“Buy a girl a drink and if she lets you talk to her while she finishes it. Nothing more.” 

 

“But why?” 

 

“What if I told you there isn’t a why.” 

 

Adam ran his palms over his thighs, “I’m not exactly good for anyone right now.” 

 

Xander had sidestepped Adam’s excuses, however, “Some people starve the emotions out of themselves,” the other man said. “They try to prevent the anger, but that isn’t going to work for you. If you could drill it out of yourself you’d have done it by now.” 

 

“And flirting with some stranger will somehow fix me?” 

 

Xander’s smile had been patient. “If the anger isn’t going to ever go away, make it share your headspace. Laughing. Flirting. Time with friends. These are the opposite of what you’re feeling. It won’t make you not angry, but it might remind you you’re more than your rage.” 

 

After Columbia, when the team walks back into their home on the base, and Jaz is there reassembling her gun, a kind of anger floods Adam.  He doesn’t know what it is. It’s not directed at her or Xander for clearing her. He gets her need to be back in the field, and he trusts Xander more than anyone to assess if Jaz was ready. It’s why he requested the man in the first place; there was no one else he wanted making that call. So the anger - it’s unreasonable and Adam knows it the moment he feels it. It’s like a wave pooling at his feet. The tug is gentle. 

 

“Top, remember you promised barbecue,” Preach says and then the guys are off like brothers scrambling and squabbling over who got the first shower. 

 

Adam uses the distraction to watch Jaz. She doesn’t look at him, but there is an undercurrent between them. He know she feels his eyes on her. This is what is between them. When necessary, they can communicate without words. It’s what makes them a good team in the field. Now he falls back on the foundation they’ve built because he doesn’t understand what he’s feeling.  

 

Adam wants to talk to her about Xander. He wants to tell her about his own experiences. He wants a lot of things recently when it came to Jaz, and most of the time he can keep those things in check. But when she had been packing up her bag for the mission it’d been frustration that had him telling her the truth:  if she wasn’t ready and something happened to her he’d never forgive himself. He saw the way that confession shifted her anger at being grounded. She’d still been mad, but it wasn’t at him. Adam wants to tell her about himself because he wants her to know whatever it is that’s keeping her up at night she isn’t alone in it. It doesn’t make her less of a soldier. It makes her a good one. The part that terrifies him is the thrill he had when he saw the impact of his feelings on her, how she relented even though still mad, and Adam wants that to be true now too. He wants it to be a given in the same way it’s a given that they don’t need words to communicate. 

 

He sits across from her at the table and hands her the next piece of her rifle. There is that arched eyebrow, which gives her face a dare-me look no matter the context, and Adam sits back. They don’t talk - they don’t need to - but he wants to and  _ that _ \- the desire he can’t keep in check - terrifies him. It feels like the wildness of youth, a way of being that he’s only seen from a distance because Adam Dalton grew up too soon. 

 

*** 

 

They sit outside the fire in silence, and Jaz lets Top’s words nudge their way into the recesses of her body.  _ I don’t know if we need to have a dark side to do what we do…  _ She imagines them taking up residence in that hollow next to her own words,  _ my guys _ . It’s the place where things mean too much, and naming that fact is terrifying to Jaz. 

 

She wants to tell him what she told Xander - that Tehran had been the first time anyone had come for her - but Jaz doesn’t feel strong enough. At least, not brave enough. Top offered to her a part of himself, but it’d been as one soldier to another. Her confession was too much to put on him and their friendship. So instead, she compromises with herself. 

 

She decides they are  _ her _ guys. It’s not really a decision as much as an acknowledgement of reality, like confessing that the sun rises in the east. So if they are her guys, then Jaz isn’t going to run away from that anymore. Sitting there in front of the fire she thinks of Elijah and there is a prick in her chest because she’s making room for them in a category only Elijah had ever occupied. The danger isn’t like storming a hostile territory, but it feels dangerous still. 

 

In the distance she can hear McG whoop, and she guesses he won whatever bet he had with Amir and Preach. Top finishes his beer, but makes no move to go inside. Instead, he leans further back to peer at the brilliant Turkish sky. When he crosses one foot over the other at the ankle, Jaz exhales. 

 

“Thank you,” she says. 

 

He looks at her, “For what?” 

 

Jaz lifts a shoulder and lets it drop as if to say  _ all of it _ , and it thrills her that Top smiles that soft she only gets to see in quiet moments like this.  _ Her guy,  _ she thinks, she can settle for that. Top can slot into that same place that Elijah, McG, Preach, and Amir occupy. 

 

“You’re welcome,” he says. 

 

That, Jaz decides, is more than she ever imagined possible. It would be enough. 

 

***

 

Jaz starts with Amir. It’s not really conscious, her trying, until she’s actually asked him to teach her how to cook eggs on a Saturday morning. She’s standing there, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, and he just looks at her like she asked him to do a burlesque dance for her. 

 

“I can make you an egg,” he says. 

 

“I know how to make an egg,” she says petulantly and shuffles toward the coffee and Amir kindly pulls a mug down from the shelf above the sink. Jaz couldn’t name exactly why she set her alarm last night to wake up before sunrise. She knew Amir would be up just before her, and the idea had struck her in that dangerous time between bed and actual sleep.  _ Why not? _ had been reason enough. 

 

“I don’t understand,” he says as Jaz pours herself coffee. He blanches when she drinks the cheap stuff black, but Jaz ignores that. She hops up onto the counter and folds her feet under her as she sips the coffee. 

 

“I want you to teach me how to cook,” she says. “I can make eggs, but how do you,” she waves a hand, “make them the way you do. You know...all fancy and stuff.” 

 

“You mean edible?” 

 

The look Jaz gives him draws a smile out of Amir. He bows his head for a moment before clapping both hands together. 

 

“Okay, we’re gonna start simple with  _ kuku sabzi _ ,” he says and moves toward the fridge. 

 

“I don’t know what that is.” 

 

“It’s Persian. Like a frittata, but with more greens.” 

 

Jaz had been thinking she’d pick up a few tips on how to make scrambled eggs, but these are  _ her _ guys and that includes Amir with his fancy ingredients. He rattles them off:  onion, chard, leek, turmeric, dill, cilantro, and parsley. 

 

“We don’t have any fenugreek leaves, but we’ll have to make it work.” 

 

Jaz just stares over the top of her coffee “Yeah,” she says dryly, “we’ll have to make it work.” 

 

Amir stills like a deer caught in the headlights, but he sees the laughter in her eyes. He laughs, and that makes Jaz happy. “If you need incentive,” he says, “making this will guarantee to ruin McG’s morning. He’s started to leave me a breakfast order for Saturday mornings. Green is not what he had in mind” 

 

That’s enough for Jaz to roll up her sleeves and take instructions from Amir. He explains a  _ kuku  _ isn’t one without a deeply browned crust, and that this gives a nice balance to the custardy center. He shows her how to add salt to the chard to balance out the bitterness, to squeeze the excess water out of the greens before adding the eggs, and grabs the last egg out of her hand right before she breaks it over the pan. 

 

“You don’t want to do that,” he says, “there’s plenty of eggs in there.” 

 

“But there’s so much...green stuff.” Jaz wrinkles her nose. 

 

“That’s good. Taste it,” he hands her a spoon to dip into the pan. When Jaz does so he waits for her reaction. “What does it need?” 

 

She wonders what the right answer is, but the one that comes first seems too simple, “More salt?” 

 

Amir tastes the pan using the same spoon, and nods, “I think so. That’s one of the first tricks to really good cooking. No matter how simple the recipe.” 

 

“More salt?” 

 

“No. Tasting. You’ve got to taste what you’re making. Cooking, it’s a lot like being out in the field. You improvise as you go.” 

 

Jaz thinks of those words Top said to her before she went into that hotel, to improvise, and the sound of his voice just before that telling her to never go off book. She knows that isn’t what Amir is thinking about when he says that; he’s CIA. His world is different than her own despite them being on the same team. For all the ways she’s fought Top she’s always been thankful for the clear chain of command. After growing up under her father’s cynical whim, Jaz is thankful to be part of a unit where what can happen is clear. There is strength in that stability. 

 

But in that last moment Top had told her to improvise. It strikes her over the  _ kuku  _ that Top trusts her. It’s not really a new revelation, but for some reason on that Saturday morning she remembers this fact and it makes her smile. 

 

“The next bit is important,” Amir draws Jaz out of her reverie. “Wipe out your pan and reheat it over medium-high heat. It’ll prevent the  _ kuku _ from sticking. We’re gonna add a few tablespoons of butter and olive oil.” 

 

He stands back and lets Jaz struggle with the multiple steps. She’s always considered herself to have quick hand-to-eye coordination, but the kitchen tools feel clumsy in her hands. The burner is hot and the paper towel soaked as she wipes down the cheap aluminum Army issue pan. Amir is there watching her and for a moment irritation flares up. She just wanted to learn how to scramble an egg. This domesticity is the kind of thing her mother wanted her to have; she wanted to teach Jaz how to make  _ mansaf, maqluba,  _ and  _ chebakia _ . Instead, Jaz liked to be outside in New York City’s parks, climbing trees, and roaming. She feels her cheeks burn and Jaz steps back from the stove. 

 

“I can’t do it,” she holds up both hands. “This was stupid. This is your thing. You do it. I’ll just mess it up.” 

 

“You can.” Amir says evenly. There is no pity in his voice. Just a firm, quiet steadiness that Jaz realizes she’s grown to rely on. Amir’s gentleness impresses her and when he says she can Jaz believes him.

 

The butter and oil have begun to foam and Amir hands her the bowl of egg and greens mixture. “Pour this into the pan,” he says. He hands her a rubber spatula. “Help it cook evenly by pulling the edges of the mixture into the center.” 

 

Jaz does what he says and takes a deep breath. Who knew making an egg would dredge up memories of her mother and the ways Jaz never could be the daughter her mother wanted? She’s thankful for the observations she knows Amir isn’t voicing. Surely he sees that her agitation isn’t just about the eggs in the pan in front of them, but he doesn't miss a beat. Jaz asked to learn how to cook an egg and so that is what he is going to teach her to do. 

 

“Okay, here is the hard part,” Amir says after a time. “We’ve got to flip it.” 

 

“Onto what?”

  
Amir bangs around the kitchen and returns with a burned and warped cookie sheet. “This’ll work,” he says. “Tip out as much of the cooking fat so you don’t burn yourself. You’re just gonna flip it so we can cook the other side. A little oil and a few minutes and we’re done.” 

 

“I’m making an egg,” Jaz shoots back, “not disarming a bomb.” 

 

Amir grins at her, “Then why are you sweating?” 

 

“Shut up.” 

 

And in the end when Amir declares her  _ kuku  _ done and perfect Jaz feels no compunction about raising her arms above her head in a V for victory. Amir gives her a high five and they make enough noise between them that McG and Top stagger out of the bunk room, shirtless, and rubbing sleep from their eyes. 

 

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” McG yawns as he pours himself coffee. Amir and Jaz ignore him as they pull out plates. Amir digs into the fridge and pulls out feta cheese and a few potatoes to chop and fry. 

 

Jaz hovers over her  _ kuku  _ and for a moment she’s pulled back to Tehran. She’s in that white jumpsuit, stiff with her own blood, and they drag her out of that building. Everything smells, but she can still feel the warmth of the sun on the back of her neck. It’d been a fleeting thought then:   _ this might be the last time I feel the sun _ . In the moment she’d thought it dully through the haze of torture and insanity, but now as she hovers over a dish of eggs as Amir chides McG, Preach wanders in from a run, and Top nudges her with his elbow, Jaz is hit with how close she’d come to losing this moment. 

 

“Hey,” Top says, “this is new for you.” 

 

He means the eggs, but to Jaz the words are more than that.

 

“Yeah,” she whispers. “Something like that.” 

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a slow burn, people. Slow burn. 
> 
> Also, if you're on Tumblr and love The Brave hit me up. My handle is kyrieanne over there too.

Again, it’s not conscious. At least not in the beginning. It’s just that Jaz didn’t grow up with a family. She grew up with people - people who looked like her and in whom she saw parts of herself - but never the whole. Never in her parents did she glimpse the whole of who she wanted to be. That was the kicker. She wanted to be different than her mother and her father, and that simple fact, while it felt natural to her, was offensive to them. 

 

So that is what  _ her guys  _ represent - some version of herself that is more whole than she can be on her own. Early in her military career, Jaz bought into the idea that being part of a whole was better than the identity of lone ranger. As a sniper it was tempting to think she was the final solution. Hidden up above with an ultimate power to finish something. All she had to do was pull the trigger. 

 

But she knows better than that now. 

 

She isn’t sure when that realization settled into the niche of herself, that place where things mean more than she can process on a daily basis. With the op tempo she has to compartmentalize and this is the thing she’s chosen to simplify, to file away, and not think too hard about. Rather than struggle against the tide, Jaz chooses to accept that she is better off as  _ part of something  _ than being on her own. Of course, this realization takes time to seep downward, like nutrients spread across topsoil. It takes time to reach the root of things.  

 

That’s what this story is about. 

 

*** 

 

Amir does teach Jaz how to make scrambled eggs. The key is to use the lowest possible heat. He shows her how to make almost anything better with pesto, and the myriad of ways a roasted chicken can transform into a full meal. He doesn’t ask why she wants to learn to cook, and Jaz couldn’t answer the question if he had. Instead, he acts as if teaching a sniper how to make a cake in a frying pan is the most normal thing in the world. 

 

Preach and McG don’t ask either, but every once in a while she’ll feel Dalton’s eyes on her when she and Amir are putting their latest concoction onto the table. She forces herself not to meet his eye, and she tells herself it’s just Top being Top. He watches. It’s what he does. She works hard to push away any stray thoughts that Top’s looks mean anything more than they normally do. That he might be seeing something happening that even she can’t name. 

 

They have four weeks left before they rotate home, and those final days after Columbia are quiet. 

 

Jaz gets up each morning to run with McG along the beach. It’s the same beach where the bomb went off just months earlier and it occurs to Jaz how different this deployment has been from previous ones. They’d lost Elijah. Amir and Hannah joined the team. Their unit was targeted, and Jaz captured and tortured. But also:  killed Baghdadi, landed a major win by bugging Boothe, and taken Jarif off the map. So much had happened, she thinks. Of course it would change her. How exactly is the question. 

 

As they reach the final stretch of their run, McG looks over his shoulder at Jaz daring her to catch up to him. Pointing out his stride is twice her own will get her no sympathy so Jaz picks up her pace. As the muscles in her legs burn she ticks off the names of the people they saved too: Kimberly Wells, Cassie Conner, Ivan Sokolov, Mina and Osim Bayoud. Whatever this tour has done, whatever the ripple effects, Jaz knows it is worth it because of those names and all the other ones she can’t name. As she overtakes McG, her whole body thrumming, Jaz reaches that place where her body outpaces her mind. It’s a blissful adrenaline rush as they reach the concrete pillions that is their stopping point. 

 

“Jazzy,” McG breathes between gulps of water. “You need another outlet to blow off some of that pent up energy. Say the word and we’ll go out on the town. I’ll be your wingman.” 

 

“I don’t need your help getting laid,” she puts her arms up above her head and paces trying to catch her breath. 

 

“Well, I’ll take one for the team and get myself some on leave if no one else is.” 

 

“Preach is married.” 

 

“Married sex doesn’t count.” 

 

Jaz laughs and catches the water bottle when McG tosses it to her. 

 

“Admit it, if it’s the right person married sex would be your favorite.” 

 

McG raises an eyebrow, but his silence speaks volumes. Jaz feels a wave of affection for this man who is like the brother she never had. He’s one of her guys and now that she’s had a little more time to get used to the words she said aloud to Xander, Jaz is grateful for them.

 

They fall into step back toward base, and McG tries hard to sound nonchalant with his question.

 

“So, uh, what are you gonna do when we get stateside.” 

 

“The usual,” Jaz says, but she knows that isn’t a real answer. Of all of them Jaz is the most reticent about what she does on leave. Her guys know it’s not a topic she’ll easily discuss, and she imagines they’ve filled in the blanks she won’t answer with their own insane ideas. The truth isn’t as much a secret as it is exactly this:  blank.

 

McG runs a hand through his hair and sweat flicks off him and onto Jaz. She punches him in the arm, and he feigns pain. Jaz laughs as he massages the spot. 

 

“You know Jazzy, my mom would love to have you up at the ranch, anytime.” McG says. 

 

“I love that you still live with your mom.” 

 

“I don’t live with my mom.” McG says. This is a well tread argument between them that Jaz will never cease to love. “I own some land with two houses on either end. My mom lives in one of them.” 

 

“Is house a euphemism for your mom lives upstairs and you live in the basement?” 

 

“Seriously, if you want to learn how to cook real food Amy McGuire is the person to teach you. You’re welcome anytime.” 

 

They’re back to the quonset hut, and Jaz tucks her chin as McG holds the door open for her. It’s a thing he still does even after years of serving together. Amy McGuire would skin his hide if he didn’t, he’d explained their first deployment together.  _ It’s not that I see you as a woman,  _ he’d clarified,  _ it’s that my mom would and, well, if you met her you’d understand.  _ Jaz met Amy McGuire a few times when she came to DC to greet her son off the plane, and that’s why she lets McG hold the door open for her. 

 

“Thanks, McG.” Jaz says. 

 

*** 

 

As they get closer to going home, Preach picks Jaz’s brain for what he should bring his girls back from Turkey until she acquiesces to combing through one of the open air markets with him one afternoon. Jaz is partial to small pieces of jewelry and bright scarves so that is what he buys. When she asks if he needs help finding something for his wife, the man huffs. 

 

“I’m a damn man, Jaz,” he says. “I know how to buy for my wife.” 

 

Just for that Jaz takes Preach by a small store where she sometimes buys the kind of top that makes her feel feminine, strappy and cut to inquire the imagination. 

 

“Your girls would love this place,” she says. 

 

He gets two steps in the door before seeing the clothes on mannequins and the sales girls probably not much older than his eldest, and when one of the girls asks if he’s lost Preach just  turns on a heel and walks out. 

 

“Come on Preach,” Jaz laughs as she follows him, “I never took you for being old-fashioned.” 

 

“You are a damn menace,” he mutters, but slows so she can fall into pace with him. They head back to base with the Turkish sun sinking along the horizon. 

 

Jaz stuffs her hands into her pockets, “What’s the first thing you’re gonna do with them? Your family, I mean.” 

 

“I’m gonna take them out to the best restaurant in town, and Maggie and I will order a bottle of wine and my girls are gonna talk over each other trying to tell me stories. Eventually they’ll forget I’m there and they’ll try to out do each other in the telling. I’ll sit back and watch. Maggie and I’ll hold hands under the table.” 

 

“That sounds nice.” 

 

“How about you?” 

 

Jaz lifts a shoulder and though Preach lets her not answer she doesn’t miss the way he looks at her.  _ Her guys _ . The fact is going stateside means a return for everyone else to their lives and family. For Jaz, her guys are her family, and going home meant waiting to get back to them. 

 

“We should hurry if we don’t want Patton to get our portion of dinner,” she says.  

 

“Yeah, we should.” 

 

Jaz knows Preach isn’t fooled, but like Amir and McG, Preach doesn’t push for explanation. There’s a gift in that being accepted without explanation. If anyone is gonna see her like this, she decides, she is glad it’s Preach. 

 

*** 

 

Hoffman happens, and as Jaz stands in the hospital room watching Preach she thinks about the dinner he described that day they spent shopping. She leans her elbows on her knees and drops her face into her palms. She’d trade places with Preach in that bed if it means he gets to have that dinner. 

 

Eventually Amir voices what Jaz has been putting off. “Has anyone called Preach’s wife?” 

 

Jaz exhales, “I was waiting for Top to do it.” 

 

But he’s gone dark, and if she thinks about that too long it will curdle the anger and fear in her stomach. She knows it isn’t fair, and it’s the least important factor right now, but Jaz is mad at Dalton. They are supposed to be a team, and he’s left them. Shut her out. Jaz swallows the anger because now isn’t the time or place.

 

She pushes off the wall, “I’ll do it.” 

 

***

 

Adam’s three younger sisters were named Faith, Sophie, and Lily. 

 

It was Lily that their father killed. 

 

It’s the most cliche story in the world: drunk driver, car wrapped around a tree, and of course his father walked away without more than a scratch. 

 

Lily had been on her way home from a school concert. One their father had promised to be at and Adam knew he wouldn’t bother to show up for, but he’d been eighteen years-old and there had been this party he wanted to go to. So he didn’t follow his instincts, which told him to blow off the party and go to his baby sister’s concert, and he decided for once his father could step up and be who he was supposed to be:  the guy cheering and wooting for the little girl on the stage in her homemade secquins costume, beaming when she hears her name shouted out. 

 

For once, Adam decides to let the responsibility sit where it belongs. After all, Adam leaves soon for basic training and it’s time for his father to get his shit together. Adam can get over his resentment for the ways his father failed him, but he better fucking show up for his daughters. 

 

So the night Lily dies, there’s a fight between father and son, and it’s the first time Adam beats his father. He pins him to the floor and it’s only because his three sisters are watching that Adam doesn’t push further, crushing his father’s windpipe into the floor, and when he shoves off his dad he makes it clear: fucking show up at Lily’s concert. 

 

Adam knows his dad. He isn’t evil or unkind. Just broken...at least he thinks that until they put Lily into the ground. After that Adam wasn’t interested in nuance when it came to his father. 

 

All he could think of was Lily, in her sparkly costume practicing her routine in the doorframe of Adam’s bedroom. It’d been the night before she’d died and her dirty blond hair, the same color of his own, kept falling in her eyes. 

 

“Think I’m ready?” she’d asked. 

 

“Of course.” 

 

Lily tilted her head petulantly, “Don’t just say that. Tell me the truth.” 

 

“You’re perfect.” 

 

“AD-AM!” 

 

“What?” his younger self protested, “I get to think you’re perfect.”

 

This is Adam’s last memory of Lily:  her flinging herself toward him, sequins scratching his arms as he hugged her tight, and the smell of child sweat on her skin. He doesn’t remember if he told her he loved her. He hopes he does. The thought drifts across his mind sometimes when he’s falling asleep, even in Turkey, that he really did say it.  _ I love you, Lily _ . 

 

It’s for Preach and Patricia and Lily that Adam shoots Hoffman without remorse. It’s methodical and only after he cleans up, heads back to base, does he feel his body catch up with his mind. He finds Patricia’s necklace and before he can head to the hospital, Adam has to lean against the metal side of the quonset hut and put his head between his knees. 

 

He doesn’t throw up or cry. Instead, a treacherous thought sneaks into his mind as he thinks of Lily, hears the sound of the gun ringing, and smells the burned metal from the explosion. 

 

He wonders what she’d think of who he turned out to be. 

 

*** 

 

“I need to call Maggie,” Adam says to Jaz in the hallway outside Preach’s room. He scrubs a hand across his face. When he looks at her she’s got her arms wrapped around her ribs and thinned lips. “But you already did.” 

 

“You went dark.” He can hear the anger in her voice; Jaz was never good at hiding her feelings. 

 

“If you’ve got something to say -,” he starts. 

 

Jaz pushes past him and for a second he’s stunned because she never walks away from a fight. But then she stops, looks at him, and jerks her head toward the stairwell. Adam exhales. She’s right. Outside Preach’s room wasn’t the place to have this conversation. 

 

Once the door clicks shut behind him, Jaz turns on her heel. She steps into his personal space and it doesn’t go unnoticed by Adam that she’s trembling. 

 

“You left us out,” she says. “That’s not how this works.” 

 

Anger flares up in him. “You don’t get to dictate how this works. It’s my team. My call to make.” 

 

“Bullshit.” 

 

“Jaz,” Adam warns. 

 

“Going after Hoffman like that wasn’t an op. It was personal.”

 

“He came into my house and he...he -,” Adam falters. He closes his eyes. 

 

“I know.” Jaz whispers. 

 

“I shouldn’t have done it,” he leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. “For us, these things don’t get to be personal.” 

 

Jaz nudges his elbow with her own, “Well, believe it or not you’re not perfect.” 

 

She makes her voice light, and Adam knows he is being let off the hook. But there’s this growing need he has to explain himself to Jaz. He wants her to know him. It’s a dangerous need, and it’s what caused him to confess after Columbia bits of his past over that bonfire. It’s why he says what he says next.    
  


“Killing Hoffman was the only call to make. But afterwards, I felt good. Not glad he was dead so he couldn’t hurt anyone else, but glad I got to be the one who put a bullet into his brain. I don’t want to be that person.” 

 

There’s silence and then Adam feels her arms around his stomach. She keeps the hug light, but stays anchored there. He threads his own arms around her and it catches Adam’s breath when she moves to rest her cheek against his chest. 

 

“I don’t want to be that person either,” she whispers. 

 

“You’re not.” 

 

“The man who over saw my torture. I strangled him, and I am glad I got to be the one to do it.” 

 

His arms tighten around her and in the moment Adam really doesn’t care about lines and protocol. He doesn’t want to try to define who Jaz is to him. She’s the one who calls him out when he goes dark, and she is the one he believes when she holds on fast to him and says, “Me too.” 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise you there is a plan!

The letter came the same day Amir joined the team, but Jaz didn’t open it until after they returned from rescuing Kimberly Wells. It was a basic form letter telling her that Elijah had left what few earthly assets he had to her.

 

A lawyer named Ivan was the executor of Vallins’ estate, and he explained in neat, short sentences that she needed to show up in Tallahassee, Florida to collect her inheritance. She’d waited until the guys were outside playing horseshoes - even Top - before hiding away in her bunk to call the lawyer. Her hands trembled when she punched in the numbers because she didn’t want to be doing this. She’d trade anything to have Elijah alive. But she manages to steady her hands and make the call.

 

“What exactly did I an inherit?” Jaz asks Ivan the lawyer. He sounds middle aged and from Florida

 

“A RV.”

 

“What?”

 

“A Fleetwood Bounder 33C-Class to be exact. Gas. Not diesel.”

 

“I don’t know what any of that means.” Jaz looks up at the ceiling. _Elijah, what crazy-ass thing did you do?_

 

“Mr. Vallins purchased a RV right before his most recent deployment. Paid cash for it so he owned it outright. Never actually used it. It’s been sitting at the dealership in storage until his return...well, now your return.”

 

“What am I supposed to do with a RV?”

 

“I think Mr. Vallins intended to live in it when he returned from your deployment.”

 

“Can’t I just have you sell it?”

 

“No. At least not until you take possession of it. And in the state of Florida you have to physically be present to take possession before you can dictate what happens to the property.“

 

“So...when my deployment is over I’ve gotta go to Florida to be able to sell a motorhome I don’t even know how to drive?”

 

“That is correct.”

 

“The law is weird as fuck.”

 

“I tell myself that every day, m’am,” Ivan the lawyer says.

 

So that’s how Jaz ends up in Florida four days after returning from Turkey.

 

***

 

Before she goes to Florida though, Jaz and the team spend two days in debrief at the DIA, and she spends a third wandering around the Smithsonian’s alone trying to get used to being back on American soil. There is always an adjustment, but this one feels harder. Jaz tells herself it’s because of all the change that came with this deployment, or may it was the length of it. Whatever it is, her whole body feels like a knuckle that won’t crack.

 

Preach had been transferred to D.C.,and on that third day his room is where she ends up. He is expected to recover, but the doctors wanted to keep him in a medically induced coma to give his brain time to heal. Maggie and the girls were at the hotel to get a break from the machines and doctors, and Jaz times her visit for exactly this window when she knows none of her guys will be there. They are at Patricia’s for a team dinner, and Jaz let Top think she’d be there too. Instead, she’d sent a last minute text to Patricia making up an excuse about post-deployment travel plans and made her apologies. It was a cop out, but Jaz couldn’t make herself sit around a table one last time before everyone else returned to their lives - their families and friends - whereas all she had was an appointment with Ivan-the-lawyer in Florida.

 

“Preach,” Jaz says alone there in his room. She ducks her head, self-conscious, even though there is no one there to witness what she says, “Being alone. Waiting for the next deployment. It used to be enough.”

 

***

 

Florida, in turns out, is sticky. Even in May. Jaz lifts her hair off her neck and winds it into a knot on the top of her head. As she digs in her bag for a hair tie sweat trickles down the back of her neck, and she half-heartedly curses Elijah.

 

She walks into showroom of the RV dealership scanning for someone who might be Ivan-the-lawyer. They’d agreed to meet there to sign the paperwork that makes her officially in possession the 34” suburban nightmare. As far as Jaz is concerned, RV’s were for old white people who wanted to pretend they liked nature and for families with golden retrievers and matching REI jackets. She still can’t believe Elijah bought an RV; he had been as much a city-dweller as herself. Whatever his reasons, they were on a long list of things Jaz would never get to ask him.

 

She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans, which were sticking to her even inside with the air conditioning blasting. Jaz pushes the melancholy to the side; it’d been with her ever since they’d set foot on American ground again. She doesn’t want to dwell on it anymore.

 

“Jasmine Khan?”

 

Ivan-the-lawyer turns out to look exactly how she imagined:  middle-aged, thin, a goatee, and wearing a shirt with red parrots on it. She shakes his outstretched hand.

 

“Jaz.”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“I go by Jaz.

 

“Oh. Of course. I should have remembered that. Elijah talked about you.”

 

“He did?”

 

“Of course.”

 

They sit in hard plastic chairs and Jaz signs the paperwork on her knees. When it’s done – she officially inherits the last remnants of her dead best friend’s life – she thinks of Top. She’s not entirely sure why. Her throat tightens and in that moment she wishes he was here sitting next to her. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d know though by the way her exhale shakes what she is feeling. Jaz covers by standing up. Ivan takes his time tucking papers away in his briefcase.

 

“I’ve made reservations for you at a local RV park,” he says as he stands.

 

“I’m not gonna…take it.” Jaz says, “I want to sell it.”

 

Ivan starts toward a set of double doors and off the showroom floor. Jaz follows in tow. “That’s fine, but the dealership isn’t going to let you keep it here,” he says.

 

“But they sell RV’s. Doesn’t it make sense to keep it here if they’re gonna sell it for me?”

 

“It’s full of Mr. Vallins’ possessions. You’ll need to go through them. Can’t do that in a garage.”

 

Jaz hurries to keep up with Ivan as he strides through rows of campers. There are a few employees working around them, but no one pays them mind. She takes two steps to stop immediately in front of Ivan, halting him.

 

“His stuff?”

 

“Personal belongings. Books. Photos. Momentos. That kind of stuff.”

 

“I understand,” Jaz’s irritation rose to the surface, “but why me? Certainly, his family would have done that by now.”

 

Ivan cocked his head sideways, “My understanding was that he considered you his family.”

 

***

 

How Florida could be sticky even at night, Jaz doesn’t understand. The air conditioner hums as she sits cross-legged on her hotel bed and scrolls through the text messages and voicemails from her guys. Well, from McG and Amir. There’s one from Noah – a photo of the group at the table, smiling. Jaz notes the empty chair with Preach’s favorite beer sitting there unopened. She smiles. There’s a second chair empty too, the one to Top’s left, but it’s empty because she ran. She did the exact thing she’d been mad at Dalton for doing.

 

She forces herself to listen to the voicemails.

 

_“Jazzy, where you at? I need you to help me make fun of Amir. He’s twitterpated by Hannah.”_

 

_“Jaz, Patricia mentioned you had something come up. Just in case you’re free McG, Noah, Hannah, and myself are going out for a drink. I’ll text you the name of the bar in case you want  meet up.”_

 

They went on like that until 2:00 a.m. when McG had called her with Amir and him on speaker phone joshing each other in what sounded like the back of a cab. McG tries to tell her about Amir’s lack of game with Hannah, and the other man corrects McG’s hyperbole. It ends with McG shouting, _“Jazzy, where you at?”_ That’s when she feels the tears well up, but she blinks them away.

 

And then one last one from this afternoon. It is Patricia.

 

_“Jaz, we missed you last night. Let me or Dalton know if we can be helpful in anyway.”_

 

Jaz exhales. Tomorrow she’ll go to the RV park where Ivan had the camper delivered. She hadn’t gone inside when he showed it to her. It was enormous with loud blue swirls along the side. When she saw it, her traitorous mind thought, _This is so Elijah._ She didn’t understand why, but he certainly had picked a rig that reflected who he’d been:  oversized, loud, and ridiculous.

 

 _“I’m a gay G.I. Joe,”_ he’d said to her once.

 

Elijah looked like a soldier too:  taller than Preach, muscled, and with a jaw so sharp he would never pass for pretty the way McG might. He exuded masculinity and Jaz knew what he meant when he’d said it. They had been arguing over which of them had been a bigger disappointment to their parents.

 

_“I’m everything my dad ever wanted in a son except I like dudes and I’m not emotionally constipated like him.”_

 

 _God, she misses him._ She thinks of Xander’s advice to be thankful rather than terrified, but since she’s gotten home it’s been impossible. Jaz knows she botched things leaving DC like she did. She doesn’t handle this stuff well. More so than anything else, that had been a major difference between Jaz and Elijah. He was sentimental and effusive with his feelings toward anything or anyone. He’d been the one to declare them best friends, and he had insisted the team celebrate birthdays while deployed. He drew people to himself, and he had been unafraid of caring about them. It’d been Elijah who first breeched the walls Jaz had put up around herself. And tomorrow she was going to have to wade into what is left of him.

 

She knows what Elijah would have called her leaving like she did -- a pansy ass coward -- and he’d insist she return those text messages and voicemails.

 

_“Half of loving people is letting them love you back, Jaz.”_

 

He’d said that on one of the nights of their deployment before he died. Jaz can’t remember what her reply had been. Probably something about him sounding like Preach, but the words come back to her now.

 

She thinks of the choice she made around that campfire with Top, when he’d shared about his own rage. She’d wanted to tell him about her fears, but it would have revealed too much. His fears were grounded in being a soldier. Hers are pathetic. How had Xander put it? Tehran had been the first time anyone had come for her. It showed how little she’d had, and Jaz just wasn’t brave enough to face Top’s pity.

 

So Jaz doesn’t call them back. She tries not to focus on the one person who hadn’t called. She knows she should have played it differently. It’d be easy to call anyone of them back and say so. Instead, she climbs off the bed to turn the AC unit up, and she forces herself crawl under the covers. Tomorrow, she’ll face the remnants of Elijah in that RV.

 

What happens after that? She doesn’t know.

 

***

 

Ivan had the RV delivered to a place imaginatively called Tallahassee RV Park, a wooded campground set outside the city. Under the sign, a plastic raccoon held up a banner, “The Friendliest Little RV Park in Town.” Jaz exhales as she pulls her rental car into the drive. She parks outside a prim white house with rocking chairs on the deck. A bell dings when she pushes the door open and Jaz blinks when it’s Ivan sitting behind the reception desk. Today, instead of red parrots, he’s wearing neon green flamingos.

 

“You,” she stammers.

 

“Me.” Ivan stands and holds out his hand. Jaz takes it automatically.

 

“I thought you were a lawyer.”

 

“Oh, I am. But I also own this place. Welcome!” Ivan rounds the desk. He picks up a map of the grounds and hands it to her, “That’s how I met Elijah. He’d stay here and when he found out I have my law degree he got me to draw up his will and be the executor of his estate. Right before his latest deployment actually. It’s almost as if he knew.”

 

As Ivan talked he led Jaz back outside past sites, some full and some empty. There are neat rows of flowering bushes and trees dripping with Spanish moss. There’s the constant hum of cicadas. It’s a pretty RV park, she thinks. Though, admittedly, she has no real reference point. It’s hardly rustic. The roads are paved and there’s a pool. They pass a horse shoe pit and Jaz knows Elijah made liberal use of that whenever he stayed here.

 

“Got the keys?” Ivan asks as they approach Elijah’s RV. She hands them over and forces herself to exhale as she climbs into the RV behind Ivan.

 

It doesn’t smell like Elijah – of sandlewood and some ridiculous hair product he vainly used every day. She doesn’t know why, but she expected this place would smell like him. Instead, it still has that new car smell. When she steps all the way into the RV, she blinks.

 

It’s _nice_. It’s roomy and the windows let the morning light stream in. There’s a L-shaped couch and floors that look like wood even though they aren’t. A television hangs above – Jaz blinks again – an electric fireplace. Who has a fireplace in their RV? Ivan is talking as he switches things on. He’s explaining what different buttons do. The RV hums to life, but she’s not really paying attention to Ivan or his instructions. She’s looking around this vehicle her friend bought and begins to wonder if Elijah hadn’t been so crazy after all.

 

***

 

Jaz starts in the closet, and that’s her first mistake. Elijah had liked to shop and nice clothes were just one of his many collections. Everything is neatly hung on wooden hangers and when she opens the door the smell she’d been anticipating floods her. She pulls a cashmere sweater off a built-in shelf, closes her eyes, and holds the soft fabric up to her nose. Comfort seeps through her muscles and for the first time since getting back to American ground she almost feels like herself.

 

“Elijah, I have no idea what I’m doing,” she says to the empty motorhome.

 

Before she can dwell more on feelings she doesn’t want to decipher, Jaz forces herself to go out to her car to retrieve the boxes she’d bought that morning. There is a job to get done, she tells herself. It’s a gift really to be able to focus on the work when the rest becomes too much.

 

Her second mistake is thinking it would only take a day go through Elijah’s things. The man liked things, and Jaz finds that a surprising amount of stuff can fit in an RV once you pack the basement – that’s what Ivan calls the outside units under the RV – full of boxes. There is a record collection and an impressive array of watches that she’s pretty sure will need to be appraised. Even his kitchen is full of gadgets from William Sonoma, and she thinks of her cooking lessons with Amir. She moves the boxes of kitchen ware into their own pile to take with her. At some point she orders a pizza and knocks on Ivan’s door with the box.

 

“I’m gonna need more than a day,” she says.

 

“I figured as much.”

 

They settle on the porch in the rocking chairs and Jaz tucks both feet under her. They eat straight from the box and sweat causes her jeans to cling tight to her legs.

 

“Where’s the nearest Target?”

 

“Planning on staying a while?”

 

“I didn’t plan on it being this hot in May. I’m gonna die if I don’t buy a dress or two.”

 

“You shouldn’t bother with the hotel,” Ivan says, “if you’re gonna stay. That’s the point of the motorhome.”

 

That’s Jaz’s third mistake. She moves out of the hotel and into the Tallahassee RV Park, the friendliest little RV park in town.

 

***

 

She finds the note on her fourth day in Florida. It’s tucked into the glove compartment box, and she stares at it for a stupid length of time before realizing her foot has fallen asleep beneath her. She moves to the couch and runs a light finger over her name in Elijah’s handwriting.

 

She gets up to turn off the music she had on and sits back down in the relative silence of the RV. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and she’s sweaty with her hair pulled high up on her head. She’s in a cotton dress and barefoot. Everything around her is normal – mundane even - but it feels like there is a cavern in her chest.

 

Jaz opens the envelope: 

 

_Jaz,_

_God, I hate that you’re reading this. I so wasn’t ready to die. I mean, we all are prepared for it or we wouldn’t do what we do. But I didn’t want to go. I had a lot of living I wanted to do. That’s why I got this monstrosity (I know that’s what you’re calling it) – to make a home and take it with me wherever I go. You and I never really had that, but we both deserve it._

_God, this is so maudlin. I don’t entirely know why I’m writing this. It’s just something I feel the need to do. I am going to laugh at myself when I find this years from now when we’ve all made it back from the deployments safe and sound. Maybe I’ll let you in on the joke. We’ll see._

_But if you’re reading this and we’re not joking about it…then I clearly went first in a heroric blaze of glory so I need to ask a favor. Live a little extra for me. Take a few more risks. Let a few more people love you. Get your stuff out of that storage unit and buy a damn vase. I don’t care what you do but believe me when I say it:  we both deserve it._

_Elijah_

Jaz drops the note to cup both hands over her face. It stifles her sobs, but there isn’t anyone to hear them anyway. All those feelings she’s kept so neatly compartmentalized rise up and she can’t stop them. It isn’t just Elijah. It’s her guys coming for her in Tehran. It’s the anger and fear she felt about Preach and Patricia being injured, Top going dark, and her feeling lost in a way she hasn’t before. And it’s this:  she gets it now. The need for a home.

 

When she stops crying, Jaz sighs and gets a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her nose is running. She shuffles around the RV and cleans herself up. She picks up the note and sets it on the counter, running her finger lightly over Elijah’s handwriting of her name.

 

“Okay,” she says aloud, “I’ll keep it.”

 

***

 

Jaz sets to the RV world much the same way she had trained to become a sniper: with complete abandon. She researches online at night and pokes Ivan with questions over pizza. She learns humidity and heat in an RV, especially in Florida, is her enemy. So, she switches out the hot halogen lightbulbs for LED ones. She buys a cell booster and learns how to dump her black water tank. Some nights, Jaz convinces Ivan to help her practice driving and parking the RV in empty grocery store lots. Nothing about living in an RV is hard compared to being on an Omega team, but she can feel herself stretching. Changing.

 

She buys more dresses and twinkle lights, which she strings up along the awning. She switches out Elijah’s black modern bedding for something she pays way too much money for at Anthropologie, and she thinks of shopping with Preach for bright scarves for his daughters just a few weeks ago.

 

Her days fall into an easy pattern. She runs before the sun is up because it’s June now in Florida and Jaz has completely given up being baffled by the thickness of the air. Her hair curls in the humidity and she doesn’t fight it. After breakfast she’ll spend a few hours on a project in the RV or run errands dispensing Elijah’s various belongings she isn’t going to keep:  the watch collection to a dealer, the records to a retirement home filled with people who will use them, and a package of old family photos mailed to his mother in Jacksonville, a woman Jaz has never met and who Elijah rarely spoke fondly of.

 

And another part of her day: a call to the nurses’ station at the hospital to get an update on her teammate and friend. The day he’s brought out of the coma and the doctors declare there’s no permanent damage Jaz tears up and bakes Preach’s favorite dessert. She’s on the family list so it’s easy to get information, but whenever the nurse asks if she wants to talk to whoever is in the room Jaz declines. They’re there and she’s not.

 

 

Of the things she keeps, it’s the kitchen ware that Jaz loves the most. She keeps up her cooking lessons from Amir by riffing off the dishes that he’s taught her. In the evenings, Ivan comes over to her camp site and they eat at the picnic table she’s dragged under her awning. She buys comfortable camp chairs and reads on her Kindle under the stars after Ivan goes back to his house. When she does that, Jaz inevitably ends up looking toward the sky, skimming the stars, and tries to not think about Top.

 

He’s the only one who hasn’t reached out.

 

Noah and Hannah sent her kind emails, and even Maggie in the midst of caring for Preach, texted her to say thank you for the daily calls to the nurses. It means a lot to him, Maggie says.

 

Sometimes the guilt of not being there keeps Jaz up at night and when it does she resorts to video games, curled up on the couch, with the blue screen glowing in the night. Her fingers itch sometimes too. She misses the weight of a rifle in her hands and the easy laughter of her guys in the Quonset hut. Ivan suggests a game of horse shoes one night, but Jaz turns him down.

 

She doesn’t respond to the texts, emails, or voice mails. Amir and McG call her sometimes and chat on her voice mail until it beeps. McG is in Montana and he tells her every time to come out for a visit.

 

 _“I’ll even put you in the guest room on the other side of the house,”_ McG says in one voicemail. _“You won’t hear me snore.”_

 

Amir leaves her voicemails about restaurants he’s tried around DC. A few times he mentions _we_ and Jaz smiles because she’s pretty sure _we_ is him and Hannah. She orders a cookbook for herself, and has a copy sent to the DIA care of Hannah with a quick note to pass it along to Amir.

 

It’s Preach who gets a response out of Jaz.

 

She’s been in Florida for six weeks now, and one day he texts her as she’s installing a solar panel on the roof. She hears the notification ding on her phone lying in the grass, and a thrill goes through her. It causes her to stop what she’s doing, climb down, and search for her phone. She brushes a stray hair off her face, and she tries not to feel disappointed when it’s Preach and not Top.

 

_We miss you, but we understand._

Jaz closes her eyes for a moment and exhales. _Thank you_ , she texts back.

 

She doesn’t fully understand what she is doing or why, but if there is anyone who she believes might see the why it’d be Preach.

 

***

 

Jaz hums to herself as she dumps pasta into the boiling water. Bread bakes in the bread machine and outside it’s raining. She’s got the windows open because the storm has cooled down the night air enough to stand it. She likes listening to rain hit the RV. It sounds like being back in the Quonset hut.

 

A moody jazz instrumental piece plays through the rig’s speaker system and she lets herself dance a little. Her dress twirls around her legs and Jaz wiggles her freshly painted toes. Pedicures were not a thing she ever bothered with before, but she likes the flash of red on her feet.

 

Somewhere in the distance there’s lightning and then the clap of thunder. She’s discovered thunderstorms and summer go hand in hand in Florida. She’s humming and the echo of the thunder lingers, but there’s no mistaking the efficient rap on the RV door. Jaz wipes her hands. Maybe it’s one of her neighbors in need of something to get through the storm. The park didn’t have a lot of people camping right now, but there were others like herself. The knock comes again, but this time it’s with the flat of the person’s hand. Insistent and intense.

 

Jaz hesitates and wishes she had her sig. But then the person says her name and her heart jumps. She opens the door and standing there in the rain is Top. He’s soaked despite wearing a rain jacket. As they stare at each other, she can see his eyes are wide. He rubs a hand over his face and Jaz would swear he’s out of breath just standing there.

 

“You went dark,” he says. He doesn’t wait to be invited inside, but he steps up into the RV. Jaz is rooted in her spot. Water drops off him and pools at her feet. “You left me out. That’s not how this works.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First: I know about as much about RV's as I do the military so I did my best to make both feel plausible. The bit about having to be physically present to take possession of property in Florida is totally made up, and probably doesn't hold up to logic...but I needed to get her there. The fact that RV's have fireplaces is completely true. Everything else is in-between. 
> 
> Second: There's gonna be plenty of Adam (and Jaz) in the next chapter. The story needed this chapter to be all Jaz. 
> 
> Third: if you're on Tumblr, come say hi. I'm kyrieanne over there as well.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, the pining is real!

“You went dark. You left me out. That’s not how this works.” Dalton swallows the last words like they’re caught there in his throat.

 

Jaz inhales. “It’s called a cell phone. Use it.”

 

“Wait, are you mad at me?”

 

“Everyone else could be bothered to send a text. Make a call. From you?” She pauses and her voice quiets. “Nothing. Six weeks and nothing.”

 

Top steps close enough so his rain-soaked shoes brush her bare feet. “You left.”

 

“It’s leave. That’s kinda the point.”

 

“But to come,” Dalton blinks as if he finally remembered his surroundings. On a different man that might be inconsequential, but this was Top. “To come here?”

 

He gestures around the RV and Jaz feels a wave of protectiveness over this place that just weeks ago she herself thought was ridiculous.

 

“It’s Elijah’s. Or was. He left it to me, and I had to come to Florida to claim the property. I planned on selling it. Thought it’d be a few days, but then I got down here and well I’m still here.” Jaz sighs. “It’s not like I had anyone waiting for me to be someplace else.”

 

“You could have talked to me. Picked up the phone.”

 

She wants to tell him that having a friend available when you need them isn’t the same as having someone waiting for you, someone who misses you, but she pushes the thought away. It feels too raw to put into words. So instead, she leans back on their friendship.

 

“The road goes both ways.”

 

Dalton’s jaw shifts and he nods, “Yeah, that’s fair.”

 

The silence shifts between them, and Jaz takes a moment to soak in the sight of him. His hair has more blond in it than usual, and she guesses he’s been in those Blue Ridge mountains he loves so much. She knows there’s an old family cabin up there he likes to haunt between deployments. It’s close enough to see his nieces, but it gives him the space Jaz imagines he needs to be around family. He’s never said it, but she’s read between the lines.

 

His gaze settles on her after sweeping the length of the RV. Jaz shifts on the balls of her feet

 

“Hi”

 

“Hi.”

 

Top scrubs a hand over his face, “I should have started with that.”

 

“Me too.”

 

Dalton lifts a shoulder, “So, wanna tell me what you’re doing in the friendliest RV park in town? At least according to the raccoon sign out there.”

 

Jaz laughs and it feels good to hear him laugh too. “I’ll open a bottle of wine and finish dinner. Go get yourself some dry clothes. I assume there’s a rental car out there with a go -bag in it?”

 

Top heads for the door, but he stops before pushing back out into the wind and rain.

 

“Jaz?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“It’s really good to see you.”

 

“You too.”

 

***

 

She turns off the music, but leaves the windows open so the patter of rain and rumble of thunder keep them company over dinner. There’s plates of pasta balanced on laps and glasses of red wine sipped as Jaz gets an update on her guys. Amir is renting an Airbnb in DC on the pretense of playing tourist, but there’s a bet going around about how long it takes for him to admit the real reason is Hannah. McG is in Montana so Amy McGuire can soak up the limited time with her son.

 

“He keeps joking that it’s a matter of time before he discovers he’s got a kid out there somewhere,” Dalton says.

 

They’re stretched out on the L-shaped couch. His wet clothes whir in the combination washer/dryer tucked into her closet. When she gave him the 30-second grand tour of the RV, he’d whistled at the slides, soft-close cabinets, and integrated sound system.

 

“It’s Elijah. Always gotta be extra,” Jaz had said and it’d been nice to recall her friend with someone who understood.

 

Now she rolls her eyes, “I swear he wants there to be a kid out there. McG is domestic as fuck.”

 

“He gives Preach a run for his money.”

 

With a single finger Jaz skims the rim of her wine glass. “I’ve been calling. The hospital, I mean. About Preach. I didn’t go totally dark.”

 

“I know.”

 

Jaz chooses her next words carefully, “I didn’t realize until I got down here that I needed something and this RV, for whatever dumb reason, has been good for me.”

 

She knows there are a lot of hedged sentences in that single one. She’s saying something and nothing at the same time.

 

Top considers her words. It’s this steadiness that she appreciates in him. He’s always assessing. She doesn’t fully understand how or when this started, but Jaz feels herself exhale a bit deeper when she knows he’s assessing a situation. She trusts him, and now that he’s sitting here on the couch with her, leg crossed over knee, Jaz remembers how much she’s missed him.

 

“So what did Elijah get you into?” He says.

 

She tells him about the form letter and first phone call with Ivan. She leaves out no detail about her first encounter with Ivan and the steps she’s taken along the way to learn how to care for this home on wheels. She doesn’t tell him about the found note or how recently getting her toes painted felt like a new kind of daring. It’s not the rush that comes from being in the field, but rather a quieter satisfaction that sinks into her when she wakes up in the morning and wiggles her brightly colored toes.

 

“I think he was trying to make a home,” Jaz says. “He bought this thing and planned on coming back here cause living from deployment to deployment isn’t a life.”

 

Her eyes fall on Dalton’s hands as he turns the wine glass in his fingers. He doesn’t look at her.

 

“Is that why you’re here too? Cause the work isn’t enough anymore?”

 

Jaz sips her wine, “Honestly? I have no fucking idea.”

 

***

 

At some point, the rain stops and they shift to safer topics:  DIA gossip, Preach’s recovery, and how long this leave might last. She keeps him laughing with stories of her New York ass living in the Florida panhandle and Ivan’s endless supply of bird-themed polyester shirts. At some point, he’s the one who opens the second bottle of wine and digs through her fridge for something sweet. They move to the middle of the couch to share the remnants of a chocolate cake Jaz made last week. They eat it off the platter with forks and when she mentions it’s a bit stale, Top’s eyebrows raise.

 

Her eyes narrow, “What?”

 

“Never thought I’d see Jaz Kahn talking about a cake she made.”

 

“Cake is damn delicious,” is her only defense and to prove her point she licks the remnants of icing off her fork.  

 

Top looks at her then and she can practically see the wheels turning in his head. He’s assessing her, and she shifts under his gaze.

 

“You’re thinking something. Care to share with the class?”

 

He just picks up the empty platter and takes her fork and wine glass from her. Jaz settles back into the couch and watches his back as he washes each piece by hand and sets it on a dish towel to dry. Long ago, they grew comfortable with silence between them. They’d sat too many missions waiting for the right moment to move to feel a need to fill the air, but still Jaz tucks a throw pillow against her rib cage. It offers a sense of presence she needs right then.

 

When the dishes are done, he wipes his hands on a dish towel and leans against the counter, foot crossed over his ankle. “I should go. Still gotta find a hotel.”

 

The obvious question hangs between them – _what is he doing here?_ – but Jaz decides to follow his lead and ignore it.

 

“This rig sleeps more than one,” she says.

 

“Jaz -,”

 

“There’s a bed that pulls down above the driver bay,” she keeps talking lest he think she’s suggesting anything else. Her cheeks burn that he might. “It’s more comfortable than the Quonset hut. Plus, it’s free.”

 

“It won’t cramp your style?”

 

Jaz snorts, “I’m living in an RV park on the outskirts of Tallahassee. Most of my neighbors are snowbirds.”

 

This earns her a laugh and it’s that easy. He agrees to stay and while he switches his clothes from the washer to the dryer, she lowers the pull-down bed, inflates the built-in air mattress, and digs out Elijah’s black modern bedding she’d banished to the outside storage compartments.

 

When she comes back inside he’s changed into a pair of basketball shorts. He’s bent over his go-bag on the floor putting his folded t-shirt away. She comes up the steps and there is his muscled back. Jaz has seen all of her guys in various degrees of dress – McG especially since the boy loved to shuck off his shirt at the first excuse – but for some reason the site of Top here in her home, barefoot like her, stutters her heart in her chest.

 

“I forget,” Jaz forces herself to swallow, “do you sleep with two pillows or one?” She hands him the bedding and moves to the end of the RV where her king-size bed is buried under throw pillows. Like painted toes this is one of the ways she feels different here than she does on the job. She – a sniper - likes to bury herself in a ridiculous number of pillows.

 

“One.”

 

Jaz smiles to herself. Of course, Top went with the bare minimum. She hands him one of the white pillows at the back of her pile and moves to get a glass out of the cupboard. She fills it with water and bangs around the kitchen for a moment trying to occupy herself.

 

“Jaz,” Top says. He’s standing there in front of her, holding one of her pillows to his side, and the edge of his boxer briefs peaking out from his shorts. Jaz tucks her hair behind her ears. Top’s voice is quiet, “Goodnight.”

 

“You too.”

 

She goes through the motions:  pulling out a pair of sleep shorts and tank top, remembering a sports bra at the last moment, and slips into the bathroom to get ready for bed. When she comes out the lights at the front of the RV are out and she can see the outline of Dalton on his back against the moonlight seeping in through the windshield. It isn’t until she’s slipped into bed, tucked among her endless pillows, that she remembers the sliding door that separates the back bedroom from the rest of the RV. She’s never bothered to shut it because until now it’d been just her. She could get up to shut it, but then she hears him sigh as he slides into sleep and Jaz decides against it. She smiles into her pillow. He’s here.

 

***

 

Adam sighs as he rubs his hand over his face. He’s lying on his back in Jaz’s RV, staring at the ceiling, and instead of sleeping all he can think about how she’s so close after weeks of missing her. Not that he’ll admit it aloud. Hell, he’s uncomfortable admitting even to himself.

 

_What the hell is he doing here?_

It wasn’t about finding Jaz – he and Patricia have known where she was since she took the train south from DC to Florida. Patricia knew more because that is her job, but he didn’t ask.

 

“Is she safe?” he’d asked the day after the dinner party Jaz failed to show up at, and Patricia had only tilted her head. Adam knew it was a stupid question; of course Jaz was safe. They were stateside and he didn’t worry about her ability to take care of herself.

 

“Do you want to know what she’s doing?” Patricia asked. She held up a report that Adam assumed someone in the DIA had written up. Tabs were kept on each member of their team even when they were stateside, and the whole team knew it. It was policy.

 

“No, she deserves her privacy. You’ll tell me if I need to know something.” Patricia had watched him in that way she had. It was a straight gaze that worked like an arrow. Dalton tapped a finger on his bosses’ desk, “I just want to know she’s okay.”

 

“That’s a question you have to ask her.”

 

After that he’d gone through the motions:  he stayed in DC until Preach awoke from his coma and then he headed to Pennsylvania loaded down with presents for his six nieces. His sisters still live in the town they’d all grown up in, and while Adam refuses to see his father, when he’s on leave he stays in the family cabin handed down to them by their mother’s father.

 

It’s an hour from Faith and Sophie and their blue-eyed daughters. They bring the girls up to the cabin and he plays uncle, teaching them how to fish, staying up too late telling them the stories of the stars, and playing endless rounds of tea party and gin rummy. This time his oldest niece, Leah, recently cut all her hair off in a pixie cut that she wanted to make her fade into the background, but it only worked to highlight her cheekbones.

 

“She looks like Lily, doesn’t she?” her mother, Sophie, said their first night after the nieces had gone to sleep. The three Dalton siblings sat on the porch passing a bottle of whiskey among them.

 

“She looks thirteen going on twenty.” Adam grumbled and his younger sisters laughed.

 

The next day, Adam decided to teach Leah marksmanship. He took her to an empty field and sat empty soda cans among a length of fence. At first, she shook from the kick-back of the gun and she walked away. Adam waited. If she was scared of the gun then they’d go back to the cabin. But it wasn’t fear. It was frustration.

 

“I didn’t even get close,” she said. For a second his blond, blue-eyed niece had the exact same face Jaz had when faced with an obstacle she couldn’t immediately conquer:  that flash of anger he found so fascinating.

 

“You can do this,” he said. She looked at him with a leveling gaze that only belongs to thirteen- year-old girls. Adam huffed, “You can because she can.”

 

He told Leah about Jaz, and that was the beginning of the missing. Or at least it was the first time he admitted it to himself.  

 

When Preach was brought out of the coma, Adam went back to DC, and he was there with McG and Amir after Maggie and the girls had finished hugging their father.

 

“Where’s Jaz?” Preach rasped. His throat was sore from the breathing tube.

 

Amir and McG looked to Adam, and he shrugged, “She went dark.”

 

Preach turned his head to McG, who confirmed it, “She’s not responding to any of our calls or texts.”

 

“Hmmm,” was all Preach had to say.

 

It’d been a few days later when he’d said more. Adam was stopping by the hospital to say good-bye – he was heading back to Pennsylvania since his long-time friend was being discharged tomorrow. He couldn’t stop talking about taking Maggie and the girls out to this little restaurant along the beach in their small Southern California town. Right before Adam edged out of the room Preach had thrown it out –

 

“You want to find her.”

 

“Patricia has tabs on her. She’s fine.”

 

“You want to find her.”

 

Adam stepped back into the room, “She doesn’t want me to find her.”

 

“Have you tried? Talking to her, I mean? I know Amir and McG have reached out. What about you?”

 

“She wouldn’t appreciate you, McG, and Amir treating her like she needs keeping,” Adam said, “she’ll call if she needs something.”

 

“Life isn’t defined by what we need,” Preach said. He grumbled as he shifted in his bed; the muscles in his body didn’t work like they had before. “At least, I hope the hell not. If it is what are we fighting for?”

 

That’d been all Preach had to say on the manner, but when Adam returned to Pennsylvania he turned the words over in his head. He wasn’t Jaz’s keeper. He recalled the look on Patricia’s face when she asked if he wanted to know if Jaz was okay. And how Amir and McG defaulted to him to explain to Preach why Jaz wasn’t there. Preach’s words lodge themselves in Adam’s gut:  _life isn’t defined by what we need_ , and while he’s gotten used to his friend’s cryptic statements this one made no sense.

 

It’d been Leah’s softball game that changed things for Adam.

 

He’d driven into his hometown to sit on the bleachers with Sophie and cheer his oldest niece on. She was her team’s catcher and Adam recognized the Dalton family competiveness in her. She fought fierce the whole game, much to the dismay of her mother who cringed each time Leah dove headfirst for a ball.

 

“I blame you,” Sophie muttered late in the last inning.

 

“Me? I’m half-way around the world most of the time.”

 

“Yeah, that’s the perfect distance for her to idolize you. And since you told her about that woman on your team all she wants to do is join the army.”

 

Adam had smiled to himself and, for the first time in a while he thought of Jaz without the twist in his gut that had been there since she went dark.

 

It’d been in that moment that the opposing team sent up to bat a hitter who drove the ball whizzing toward second base. Adam and Sophie stood with everyone else as the player on third crossed home to tie the game. Their own team passed the ball from the outfield to the infield as the hitter rounded third. The ball and the runner came at Sophie, who was covering home base. Adam forgot to breathe as his niece arched up for the ball. It came down on her as the runner slide into home and for a moment Adam thought she had it.

 

But she didn’t. The ball dropped into the dust and the opposing team’s bench burst onto the field in celebration. Despite having experienced his share of high-stress situations, Adam had found himself winded as they headed toward the parking lot. It wasn’t until they climbed into the car that Leah whipped her glove across the car.

 

“Hey,” Sophie had snapped, “it’s a game. Not life or death.”

 

“But I wanted it,” Leah cried. Her face was blotchy and she wiped dusty hands across her face. “I wanted to win so bad. It hurts.”

 

It was in that moment, sitting in the passenger seat of his sister’s car that Adam understood what Preach had meant. His thirteen year-old niece didn’t need to win; she wanted it.

 

**

 

In the morning, Jaz lets herself linger on Top.

 

She’s up for her daily run before the sun and she stops on her way out of the RV to let her eyes slide over him asleep. He’s on his stomach, his hair sticking up in all sorts of directions, and he’s hugging the pillow with one barefoot sticking out from the covers. She likes seeing him like this. He’s messier somehow, and that makes her smile.

 

She goes for her normal run – past Ivan’s house and the raccoon sign and down the two-lane highway until she reaches the gas station. She loops around the man-made lake in the RV park and waves to the Thompsons, one of the few other long-term residents like herself. They are eating breakfast, and by the time Jaz gets back to her own campsite she’s wishing she’d made something last night for breakfast.

 

But then she opens the door to her own rig and the smell of omelets and breakfast potatoes greets her. Top is at the stove. His hair still sticks up in a thousand directions, but at least he’s found a shirt to put on.

 

“Hey!” he says, “perfect timing. Breakfast is ready.”

 

He’s already set out dishes on the table and as Jaz slides into one side of the dinette and he places the steaming plates of food down, she can’t help but linger on the feeling blossoming in her chest. _This_ is what she has missed. This feeling of family and belonging. It’s what she has with her guys, and getting it here with Dalton on leave feels like stealing.

 

***

 

Adam finds himself fascinated by the RV. It’s a lumbering, inelegant piece of machinery, but there is something charming about it. He thinks about it like an elephant. Nothing about either has anything subtle going on, and yet there is a sense of audacity he can admire. Let’s take every modern convenience built into a suburban home and _put it on wheels_. He takes up the first full day with Jaz making her show him how everything works, and then he neatly sets aside the obvious question:  _why are you here and when are you leaving?_ by clapping his hands together and suggesting steaks for dinner.

 

They grill outside and argue about whether they should have a fire.

 

“Top, it’s 92 degrees.”

 

“Adam.”

 

“What?”

 

“Call me Adam,” he says and tips back his beer, “we’re on leave.”

 

Jaz falters and there’s a part of him that is satisfied by throwing her even if it’s for a moment.

 

“Fine,” she drops down onto the picnic bench next to him, “Adam, it’s 92 degrees.”

 

“It was 92 degrees. Sun’s gone down. Gotta be at least down to 85 now. Practically balmy.”

 

The look of indignation on her face makes him smile. She eyes him and there’s that thing they’ve always had – the silent communication bit – that does the work of settling them both. There’s no fire, but there is the glow of the twinkle lights Jaz strung up, and the bright moon. Bats swing above their heads through the Spanish moss laden trees, and there is the whirring of bicycles as the Thompsons – Adam met them today when they came over to introduce themselves to Jaz’s boyfriend, as they called him – ride by on their nightly loop around the RV part.

 

“How were the mountains?” she asks and Adam nods. He hadn’t told her he’d gone home, but it’s Jaz and she pays attention.

 

“I’ve got this niece Leah…”

 

***

 

That night both Adam and Jaz lay awake, but for different reasons.

 

She stares at the ceiling and tries to think of excuses to keep Top – Adam – here longer. All day she kept waiting for him to say he needed to get back to his family and life, and surely instead of breakfast tomorrow she’ll come back from her run to find him packed and ready to say good-bye. She tells herself to be grateful that he showed up; he’s her CO and certainly she’d never expected him to make the trip down here to make sure she was okay. But he had and Jaz tucks that fact away. She tells herself it’s enough.

 

Adam lies staring at the ceiling too, but his thoughts are different. His pillow smells like her. That had been the first thought he had this morning and it’s what is keeping him awake now. It’s the salve she put on her skin and hands when they are deployed. Some sort of lemon and lavender smell she kept in a tin can in her pack. There’d been plenty of flights where he’d seen her pull it out and work it into her hands. She said it kept the muscles in her fingers relaxed without losing her grip.

 

Even though she hasn’t handled a gun in weeks she still puts it on religiously morning and night. Adam watched her tonight as she got ready for bed. He’d been on the couch reading on his tablet as she went through the motions. He stole glances at her brightly painted toes and wondered if that was a new thing or if he simply hadn’t noticed before. He wanted to ask, but couldn’t come up with a way that seemed appropriate.

 

He exhales and rubs a hand over his face. Appropriate didn’t apply to any of what he’s doing – traveling to Florida, staying here, and worst – figuring out ways to side-step the obvious questions he doesn’t have answers too. Jaz has always been upfront so he’s surprised she hasn’t brought it up. _Why are you here and when are you leaving?_ Adam wonders how long he can put it all off, and when he falls asleep thinking how his pillow smells like her, he knows all of this – whatever it is – was inevitable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whatcha think?


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, feelings are hard.

 

“Why are you here?”

 

Jaz asks on the third day and it stills every muscle in Adam’s body. He’s on his back underneath the front end of Jaz’s RV, and that position protects him for a moment. Just a moment to close his eyes. Then he slides out and is met with her fixed stare looking down at him.

 

Adam swallows. Jaz folds herself down onto the ground so she’s sitting beside him – he’s laid out on a dolly so he can access the underbelly of the RV.

 

He’s installing an upgraded sway bar, a feature he’d informed Jaz after careful research, would make her gas-engine RV a much smoother ride. He’d expected a counter-argument on her part because so often in the field that is the role she plays. He can always count on her to voice what he needs to hear. But she has no counter-argument. Just a question he’s been avoiding for days. She sits down on the ground so their hips meet under the sweaty mid-afternoon Florida sun.

 

“I don’t know,” he answers.

 

Jaz nods, “I thought as much.”

 

“I missed you,” he can see the surprise in her eyes, and he sits up so they are face to face.

Adam hurries the next words, “- the team. I’m like you. There’s no one waiting for me when I come home on leave.”

 

“But Lily and Sophie and Leah…” she names the rest of his nieces. He doesn’t know how to explain to Jaz the difference between the family you’ve inherited and a family you’ve chosen.

He knows he’s lucky to have his sisters and nieces. He loves each of them with a love that runs as still as river water. It is quiet, but deep. Still, the family he’s chosen – Jaz chief among them – occupies a different kind of space. There she is blinking at him with wide eyes, and Adam wants to tell her the truth. He missed _her_ , and not the idea of found family. She isn’t representative of something; she’s Jaz. He wants to tell her that, but he also doesn’t know what it means – how it would change things between them – to confess that to her – so he settles for a half-truth.

 

“You said no one is waiting for you when you come home,” he says. He sees the vulnerability flash in her eyes and he wants to soothe it out. He leans closer but stops short of touching her.  It isn’t his to do so. He hasn’t earned that right, “Well, we’re in that category together.”  

 

She says nothing for a long moment and Adam watches her. She stares at her palms. Then she says, “You’re a good CO,” as if that is the final answer to her question.

 

She stands up and that’s it.

 

That night they sit outside like each night before, but this time the silence isn’t companionable. At least, not to Adam. Jaz reads a book on her Kindle without pause. They’re sharing the last glass of wine. Tomorrow will include a trip into town for groceries. When she reaches for the glass her elbow brushes against his forearm and Adam tucks his chin. He resents the neat, practical way the she’s packaged them as if they are just a tactic; that even this, whatever it is that they’re doing at the friendliest RV park in town, is about the job.

 

“Top -,”

 

“Adam.”

 

“Adam,” she says with an arched eyebrow as she takes a sip of the wine. “Whatever’s got you stuck in your head tonight – I can practically hear you thinking – it might do you some good to talk about it.”

 

She hands him the glass of wine and goes back to her book. Adam holds the glass and stares up at the stars. For once, they don’t settle his restlessness.

 

Later that night, he is left wide awake staring at the ceiling imagining what he could have said to her in that moment. He’s not ready to give voice to the truthful answer to her question. That’s why he had been working on the sway bar when she asked him. He likes the RV – he admits that to her the second day there and has to suffer under her know-it-all grin – and it gives him an excuse to stay.

 

Jaz had looked incredulous when he came back from the RV dealer with the sway bar and other parts he’d need for projects he had planned. He tells her the sway bar will help steady the ride, and Adam ignores her when she points out she’s never taken a road trip.

 

“All I’ve done it drive it around a parking lot,” she says.

 

“Still, it’s good to have a plan for when you’re ready. For that you’ll need the sway bar.”

 

The RV had been an excuse, albeit a weak one, until she posed the question and even though he knew it was coming he hadn’t been prepared. It is a new sensation for him and lying awake that night he steals a glance in the dark of her profile splayed across a ridiculous number of throw pillows. He rubs a hand over his face. He let her think him being here is just about duty; he knows -tactically - that is the definition of retreat.

 

***

 

“So you’re the boyfriend?”

 

Adam looks up at a man in the brightest orange shirt he’d ever seen. It was covered in owls and it actually hurts to look at it.

 

“You must be Ivan.”

 

“Did you know Elijah?”

 

“I did.”

 

Adam can see Ivan evaluating him. He stands up from the camp chair he’d been sitting in.

“Jaz is running errands in town.”

 

“Usually she borrows my car.”

 

“I’ve got a rental.”

 

Ivan jerks a thumb over his shoulder, “She’s got a package.” He retrieves a box from his golf cart and hands it over to Adam. Then right before pulling away from the campsite, Ivan hesitates.

 

“I don’t know what it is you guys do. Both of them were pretty vague about it; Elijah said it had to be that way. Whatever it is I know the both of them ended up here looking for something else. She deserves to find it.”

 

***

 

“Your bird lawyer thinks I’m your boyfriend,” Top – Adam – says that night over pizza. They’d made it from scratch and baked it in a cast iron skillet over the camp fire.

 

Jaz chokes on the bite she’d just taken and a few minutes lapse between them as she takes a drink of water and catches her breath. 

 

“That’s probably because the Thompson’s assumed so too.”

 

“Probably,” Dalton says and then grins, “he doesn’t like me.”

 

“What’d you do?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

Jaz snorts and reaches for the package Ivan delivered. It sits on the other end of the picnic table. She slides it over to Adam.

 

“It’s for you,” she says.

 

He pushes his plate aside and Jaz feels a deep sense of satisfaction when he opens the box. The first thing he pulls out is navy ticking tape bedding and the plain white linen sheets she ordered.  

 

“I figured since you’re staying a while I’d get something other than Elijah’s black satin sheets,” she says, “the linen will breathe at night. Keep you from throwing the blankets on the floor.”

 

“I have no idea how you sleep under a down comforter in Florida in June.”

 

Jaz smiles at the gentle ribbing and pulls out the next thing.

 

“You got me hangers?”

 

“Since you’re gonna stay a while I thought you might want to unpack your go-bag. Hang up a few things.” She nudges the box, “there’s one more thing. Down in the bottom.”

 

Adam digs and when he pulls out two scotch tumblers he laughs.

 

“I know wine isn’t your usual beverage of choice.” Jaz says. “The glass is shatter resistant so they’re RV approved.”

 

Those blue eyes of his meet her’s and he says thank you in that way he has:  where the simplest of words mean more because it’s Adam, “Thank you for making space for me.”

 

She nods because the words are caught in her throat and she makes herself focus on putting the discarded packaging back into the box. She can feel his eyes on her.

 

“You ordered this stuff before you asked me yesterday if I was staying.”  

 

Jaz feels the heat rise to her cheeks and is thankful for the purple dusk light around them. She shrugs, “I was hoping you’d stay.”

 

***

 

There’s a routine after that and they fall into it with ease. Jaz runs in the mornings and sometimes he joins her. If he doesn’t there’s breakfast waiting when she gets back, and she does the dishes while he showers. Afterwards, when it is her turn to get ready, she likes the way the bathroom steam smells like his shampoo, peppermint and Adam. They’ve lived like this before – in close quarters – but never just the two of them and never like this – at a leisurely pace.

 

There are RV projects to keep them occupied:  upgrading the battery packs to maximize the energy drawn from the solar panels Jaz installed last month and switching out the headlights for LED ones. It’s nice to have someone to work side-by-side on making this place her own. What’s even nicer is that Adam never asks why she is doing all this work. Is this RV park going to be her home between deployments now? When she’d promised Elijah she’d keep this thing had that meant the life that went with it too? Jaz doesn’t have answers, and it’s nice that Top doesn’t seem to care if she does. He said they were in the same category, and while Jaz doesn’t fully agree – he has a family to come home too and a life waiting for him – she appreciates he might have his own questions that are unanswerable. If being here somehow makes whatever is haunting him – to borrow a phrase from Xander – then Jaz doesn’t feel guilty she’s keeping him from the people who love him.

 

Amir sends Jaz a cook book and a note, _Since I’m not there this’ll keep you learning. Remember – the secret to good cooking is to taste and taste often._  It’s more text book than a collection of recipes. Jaz sits outside by the campfire in the afternoons reading through the chapters. A few weeks after arriving in Florida she bought a spiral notebook at the grocery store; it’d started as a way to keep lists of RV related projects, but now it is full of her scrambled notes on cooking, the RV, and whatever else felt like it needed to be jotted down. She likes how her loopy scrawl fills up the pages. She runs her hand over them and thinks of the envelope tucked in her go-bag under her bed. Her name in Elijah’s handwriting. She recalls what he asked her to do: to live a little extra for him, and she likes to think the notebook has something to do with keeping that promise.

 

At night, when Jaz experiments with the lessons in her cookbook, Adam reads. He reads histories by David McCullough and novels by Pat Conroy while sitting on the couch and these nights are some of Jaz’s favorites. They buy a few good bottles of scotch and end up eating whatever Jaz has made in front of the television. One night they both have a bit more to drink than they ought and somehow end up staying up all night binge watching The Great British Bake-Off. In the morning, Jaz wakes up on one end of the couch, covered with a blanket at some point in the night by Adam, with a hangover that she’s too old to have. Adam whistles as he makes breakfast and she hurls a pillow at him.

 

“You better be nice to me,” she mumbles, “I have video evidence of you arguing passionately that your eyes are bluer than Paul Hollywood’s.”

 

Adam freezes and by the look on his face she realizes he doesn’t remember that part of the evening. Jaz has to hide her phone after that to keep her blackmail footage safe.

 

Their days are punctuated with interruptions by real life too. Every few days Adam talks to Patricia on his secure stat phone, and while they don’t talk shop much Jaz knows the world continues to spin while she is holed up here in the friendliest RV park in Tallahassee, Florida. There are reports to read on current world affairs written by DIA analysts, and every time Jaz flips open one she looks for Nate or Hannah’s name on it.

 

That’s another thing Adam doesn’t push Jaz on:  has she contacted anyone else on their team? If he hadn’t come for her would she still be out here on her own? The answer is yes, but as each day passes with Adam side-by-side with her Jaz finds herself more unsure of how she’ll ever go back. A good soldier learns never to be too reliant on one strategy or weapon; you must be able to adapt to whatever circumstances you find yourself. That advantage keeps you alive. With time, Jaz feels that edge being buffered away.

 

***

 

It’s been two weeks since Adam showed up at Jaz’s door, and he needs to turn in his rental car tomorrow so they decide to go to Apalachicola, an oyster town a few hours away. The drive out there takes them along the Gulf of Mexico, and Adam steals glances at Jaz. Her toes are painted siren red and she has her feet up on the dash. Her hair is piled on top of her head, but curly strands fall out and skim her shoulders. Her skin has darkened since they got home and Adam is going to miss seeing her in dresses like this when they redeploy. He’s seen her in all manner of get-up for missions, but her collection of summer dresses are her own. They’re simple and efficient given the humidity; today’s is black, tied at the waist, and skims that place on her ankle where the bone bumps out. He recalls what she said to him a few months ago, _You’re the only CO I’ve had who doesn’t look at me and see a woman first._

 

Adam forces himself to look at the road. With each passing day it’s harder to lie to himself and say on his side the feelings are uncomplicated. Each day there’s a new detail about this woman – who is also a soldier and a friend – that he finds fascinating. Jaz hums to the beach music playing on the radio, and Adam notices a thin scar along the edge of where her dress sits on her back. He knows that scar. It’s one left over from Tehran. It occurs to him in that moment that they have earned today with its shinning sun, glinting off the sea, and wind whipping through the rolled down windows. They pass beach houses obscured by reeds and grass, dunes littered with driftwood, and long stretches of beach. Here in this part of the world, Adam thinks, it’s easy to believe they are a man and a woman out for a drive and in search for good seafood. In this place he can almost forget who they are and imagine who they could be.

 

***

 

Apalachicola is historic buildings, boardwalks lined with crushed white oyster shells, and the best damn crab cakes Adam has ever had. Both he and Jaz audibly moan when they bite into their lunches at the Owl Café. Jaz insists they try half the menu and when he protests she grins at him with that half-smile that always manages to hook him.

 

“Live a little,” she says.

 

Adam starts to retort back, but then he realizes she’s teasing him and he tries to give her _the look_ but smiles instead. So they eat chowder, oysters fried, grouper, and shrimp and sausage jambalaya. Afterwards, they walk off some of the food by poking around in artist galleries and shops of homemade goods. There are too many things shellacked with seashells for Adam’s taste, but he does get lost in a used book store while Jaz wanders into the adjoining pottery shop. She finds him among the naval history section, sitting cross-legged surrounded by old books of maps and facts.

 

“I didn’t know you liked books so much,” she says as she sits down next to him. Their knees brush. Adam shows her the map on his lap and without realizing it he’s the one doing all the talking. They sit there pouring over old military history until both of their butts go numb. Adam reshelves the books the best he can, and Jaz asks him why he doesn’t buy a few.

 

“I can’t take them with me on a deployment,” he says, “so what’s the point?”

 

Jaz doesn’t say anything in response and Adam forgets the comment until they wind up at the Gibson Hotel with it’s wide wrap around porch, hanging baskets of ferns, and piano bar. The sun is setting and folks watch it from rocking chairs on the porch. The windows and doors to the hotel are thrown open so that the music and conversation from the lobby float on the air. They get a cocktail and a platter of raw oysters that had been alive in the ocean that very morning. They are lucky enough to find two rocking chairs next to one another, and Adam balances the platter on his knees. He notices then the bag next to her chair.

 

“Did you buy something?”

 

“Oh, yeah,” she says absently, “while you were in the bookstore.”

 

“What’d you get?”

 

Jaz hands him the bag and Adam unwraps a beautifully thrown blue vase. It’s simple and elegant.

 

“I know it’s about as practical as those books,” Jaz says in a hurry. “Just – someone told me once to buy myself a damn vase and when I saw that one it felt right.”

 

Adam settles back into the sway of the rocking chair. He turns the vase over in his hands and feels the sting of regret. Today had been a beautiful day. The kind you remember at the end of your life, and the things that had made it up - long winding roads, savory food, lingering hours spent on books and art, wide porches whose only purpose was to witness the sun rise and set, then of course _Jaz_ – these things other than her cannot go with Adam on the job. Sure, when deployed there are moments that hint at what today had been like. That day on the beach before the bomb when it was just his team against the neighborhood kids in a game of pick up soccer comes to mind. But today wasn’t beautiful because it had been filled with lovely things, Adam realizes. He likes life when he’s deployed. He isn’t Preach waiting to get back to his kids. The field is where Adam feels most at home. Rather, what today had in common with being in the field is _her_.

 

It’s sitting on a porch as the sun sets, holding a blue vase, and feeling his heart clench in his chest that Adam Dalton finally finds the courage to admit to himself what he already knew:  he has feelings for her - they are jumbled up and dangerous, but they are also clear as the music playing around them. He's falling for her.

 

***

 

The next day Jaz comes back from her run to find her blue vase sitting on the kitchen counter next to her cookbook from Amir. In it are a few opening buds. She stops to touch the petals and she can feel Adam’s gaze on her as he comes in from outside.

 

There’s a post-it note next to the vase and in his chicken-scratch are the words, “I’m here because I want to be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this went up a day late. It's my birthday (Monday) so part of the weekend was spent celebrating. The cookbook Amir sent Jaz is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. 
> 
> Next up: things get complicated. Look for the next chapter on Thursday. 
> 
> Tumblr: kyrieanne


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll either love me or hate me.

“Come dancing with us.”

 

Jaz looks up from her cookbook as Ivan pulls up in his golf cart. Today he’s sporting a red shirt with toucans juggling fruit baskets; he’s trimmed his goatee but Jaz decides it’s not something he’d want her to comment on. It’s afternoon and she’s hiding from the sun under the RV’s awning, sweating between her shoulder blades, and sipping a margarita Adam made her that is _strong._  He’s inside on the phone with Patricia so Jaz took her reading outside to give him privacy.

 

She arches an eyebrow, “Dancing?”

 

“You know people moving their feet to the rhythm of music.”

 

“I don’t dance.”

 

Ivan settles into the camp chair next to her. He lolls his head in her direction. “There were a few nights before your boyfriend showed up where you danced on my porch.”   


“First off, not my boyfriend,” Jaz takes a long sip of her margarita. “Second, I was drunk and it was once. You dared me to do the Dougie. I hardly call that dancing.”

 

Ivan pins her gaze with his own. “Jaz, you’d have fun. There’ll be salsa and the best people.”

 

“Clubs aren’t really our thing.”

 

“You mean it’s not his thing.”

 

“What’s your issue with him?”

 

“I thought he wasn’t your boyfriend.”

 

“He isn’t.”

 

“Then why do you care what I think?”

 

Jaz shrugs a shoulder, “Cause you keep making snide comments like that and I don’t appreciate it.”

 

Ivan nods, “That’s fair. I wanna like him. I do. But you’re Elijah’s family and he was -,” whatever words are there get stuck in his throat and Jaz puts down her book. She leans forward. Ivan isn’t one of her guys, but he is a friend.

 

“What was Elijah to you?” she says softly.

 

Ivan inhales and looks at her. “It was one sided. He was a different generation than me. My admiration – my feelings – weren’t important. I was proud of him. Being both out and a soldier.”

 

Jaz feels the pinprick of tears; damn, she misses Elijah. He was the first of her guys. She thinks of the rest of them:  McG, Amir, and Preach. Adam is in his own category. But these guys – they love her. With Elijah – her face was the last thing he saw on this earth. She watched the life drain from his eyes, and the image that haunts her at the deepest part of night is the last expression on his face. It’s frozen in her imagination forever. It’s one of peace. Not pain or fight. Rather, she replays in her mind the way the muscles in his face relaxed and his head dipped against her as if death – even by enemy fire – was a human experience as natural as breathing rather than something to fight against.

 

“He did a better job at living than me,” Jaz says.

 

It feels weird to have a conversation like this in the brightness of day. Usually these are the thoughts she keeps to herself in the middle of the night.

 

Ivan nods, “Me too. It took me years to be myself, out loud, I mean. He risked all of it – his family, career – to be honest with himself.”

 

Jaz waits until Ivan will meet her gaze, “I don’t take it lightly what he did – leaving this to me.”

She jerks her head at the RV. “I mean it’s a giant gas-guzzling monstrosity, and I feel ridiculous owning one. But I know I was his family and if he couldn’t have it, he wanted to give me the chance. To have a home.”

 

Ivan rubs his hands together, “I think whatever you have with your not-boyfriend is messy; the lines aren’t clear. I think you deserve better and Elijah’d agree with me.”

 

Jaz bites her tongue because Ivan couldn’t be more wrong. The lines between her and Adam are well defined; there were hundreds of pages of policy dedicated to fraternizing between commanding officers and their teams. When she’s alone in her bed at night and can hear his breathing as he sleeps just at the other end of the RV she has to walk herself through those guidelines as a reminder why _that_ is a non-sequitur. She tells herself the idea of _them_ is an abstract idea; it’s like imagining what you’d do if you inherited a billion dollars. Just because your brain can think it up doesn’t mean those hopes are grounded in any sort of reality.

 

But she can’t explain that to Ivan without telling him about the Omega team. He only sees part of what makes her and Top _them_. It’s occurred to her since that morning when Adam left the flowers in the vase for her that when they go back to work it will be hard for her to shift backwards. It’s what the job requires, but after this leave she knows it’ll be harder. He’ll need to be just another one of her guys instead of Adam.

 

Ivan stands as Adam opens the RV door. The two men give each other a curt nod, and Ivan says to Jaz over his shoulder, “Think about it.”

 

He climbs back into his golf cart, and Jaz isn’t sure which he means – the dancing or deserving better.

 

***

 

Adam doesn’t know why he wakes up; he can sleep through just about anything. But she shrieks and he is awake. There’s a second cry, and he rolls out of bed without thinking. She’s buried in that ridiculous mound of pillows and he catches one of her fisted hands before it punches him in the kidney. He leans one hip onto the bed and puts gentle pressure with his free hand on her shoulder.

 

She’s caught in the nightmare, but he’s careful not to shake her. His hold on her flailing arm drops as she burrows deeper into the covers – away from him – and it takes more self-control than he’d like to admit not to scoop her up into his arms. But he’s come out of night terrors before and he knows holding her tight will only scare her more. So instead, he keeps a gentle pressure on her shoulder and says her name without any urgency.

 

“Jaz, you can wake up.”

 

She whimpers and turns away from him.

 

Adam tries again, “Jaz, it’s safe to wake up. You’re not alone.”

 

Those words seem to work because she rolls toward him and he leans further onto the bed so she can feel him there with her. His thumb on her shoulder finds the skin right beneath her collarbone and strokes it. Slowly she comes out of the nightmare and Adam finds himself breathing with her, slow and deliberate.

 

“What?” She croaks.

 

“Night terror,” he says.

 

Jaz groans. Adam forces himself to let go of her shoulder, but he keeps his position there on the bed. She pulls both hands over her eyes and gives an exhale whine of frustration.

 

“Wanna talk about it?” he asks. She shakes her head no and he expected as much. He tugs on her hand to pull her from the bed, “Come on, I’ll let you beat me at video games.”

 

She hesitates and Adam wants to cut her off, but the words come tumbling out.

 

“You don’t have to.”

 

They both know she doesn’t mean beating him at video games.

 

“I want to.”

 

Adam notices the way she relents then; how those particular words when said by him make a difference. The fact catches his breath, but he tucks this observation away because right now it doesn’t matter. She does.

 

***

 

It’d been Elijah’s face and then Amir’s, McG’s, and Preach’s. Each in her arms with her face hovering over them as the last thing they saw. Then it’d been Adam’s and Jaz is pretty sure that’s what caused her to cry out in her sleep. She’s not sure and she is determined to banish the flicker of faces of her guys – first scared and then peaceful – from her mind tonight.

 

She would have succeeded by now – they’ve been playing video games for three hours – but Adam keeps looking at her as if she is a target to assess for weaknesses. He thinks he’s being sly about it. His hands keep moving over the controller and the slide of his eyes in her direction is slight, but every time he does it he screws up in the game somehow. And it’s pissing Jaz off.

 

It happens again, and this time Jaz doesn’t pretend not to notice. In the game she turns her gun on his character and shoots at him. Her game character misses on purpose and the shot just clips Adam’s character on the shoulder. It’s a flesh wound, but it does cause their target to escape and Adam to drop his controller.

 

“Jaz, what the hell?”

 

“I could ask you the same thing,” she levels her gaze at him.

 

The difference between Jaz and Adam is that her anger ripples outward when not on mission. When it’s just her she can’t hide the emotions, but with Adam whatever he’s feeling turns inward. There’s a reservoir somewhere inside of him where feeling can be neatly stored. It’s a skill Jaz has always envied in the same way she envied Elijah’s effusiveness. It makes Adam steady in a way Jaz has never felt, and most of the time she trusts that steadiness more than herself.

 

But tonight is messy. She resents the way Adam waits as if he already knows how this is going to play out. She’s just feeling the leftovers of her night terror. She can practically hear the logic she knows is going through his head, and she doesn’t want it. No tonight. She doesn’t want to be someone he handles.

 

“Forget it,” she says and she pushes off the couch.

 

She outside the RV before she can think about where she’s going, barefoot, in sleep shorts and a tank top, in the middle of a muggy Florida night. The twinkle lights are still on and there is no one camped at the sites on either side of the RV.

 

She can hear Adam step down onto the mat they have under the awning. Her back is to him and he’s barefoot so really she doesn’t hear him, but the sound of him moving toward her:  the door opening, the creak of the steps, and the quiet that follows. That’s such a Top thing – she thinks – the quiet that follows.

 

“Talk to me,” he says, and then he does something that Jaz never sees coming.

 

He anchors his hands on her hips – palms open - and his thumb grazing her left hip bone where her tank has ridden up. And then he turns her to him. Her breath catches and she is held.

 

This is what it feels like:  his arms wind around her and she is in the concave of his chest. She thinks of the day in that hospital stairway where she had hugged him, tentative and unsure, and then to their escape from Tehran cramped side-by-side in the bed of that truck when he’d said those same words. _Talk to me._ This isn’t that. This is her cheek against his skin because he never bothered to put on a shirt after they started up the video game. This is his hand stroking her neck beneath the curtain of her hair. Whatever _this_ is Jaz knows she’s never had it before. 

 

She presses her nose into his skin, “I don’t want to be handled.”

 

“I’m not -,”

 

She tips her head back to meet his gaze, “You want me to talk because that’s what is good for me so I can be alright in the head. So when the next deployment comes around -,”

 

He cuts her off by cupping her face in his hands. “I don’t want you to be in pain,” he says, “and if you are I don’t want you to be alone in it.”

 

The difference between Jaz and Adam is that her emotions ripple outward, and now they are too much for words. They are there in her face and part of her worries what he might see. The feelings she’s logic-ed herself out of or how much she wants to be wanted. But the feelings are too much for her to hide tonight. She rises up on her tiptoes and it brings her high enough to lean her forehead against his. His arms band around her waist to hold her there flush against him.

 

“You’re not an obligation to me,” he whispers into her hair, “I’m here cause I want to be.”

 

Jaz isn’t really sure how long they stand there, but eventually Adam shifts his hands on her so that she’s tucked along-side him, “Let’s try getting some shut eye,” he says.

 

They climb back into the rig and Jaz drops her hand from his. She’s gonna crawl into bed and bury herself in the pillows. She’ll worry tomorrow about what she might have revealed tonight. But he catches her hand again and tugs her toward the couch. He maneuvers them so she’s tucked between the back of the couch and him. They’re pressed together on the narrow couch, but she gets why. This feels safer than either of their beds.

 

Jaz hums a contented sigh and presses her nose into his shoulder. Her finger tips brush over his stomach and the muscles there, and she reminds herself not to touch too much. Adam is her friend and partner. The line between them has blurred enough for one night. He sucks in a breath and she pulls her hand back.

 

“It’s fine,” he whispers and grabs her hand and places it back where it’d been.

 

“I have cold fingers,” she says.

 

“Yeah, that’s it.”

 

Jaz is so sleepy that she can’t quite read the tone in his voice, and in the morning when she remembers the last words she heard before sleep she’ll decide she imagined them. Adam Dalton would never say something so sentimental.

 

“It’s safe to sleep. You’re not alone.”

 

***

 

The thing about trauma, like grief, is that it’s never linear. Adam knows this so when Jaz wakes up with a grin and a challenge to beat her in a morning run he doesn’t worry. It does take him a moment to collect himself after she scrambles off the couch to change into workout clothes. He hangs back in the concaved sofa cushions still warm from her body.

 

He woke up before her, hard and wanting her badly, and he managed to shift so she wouldn’t feel it. He didn’t want her to think what he was offering – his arms and weight – came with any stipulations. Yes, he wants to let his hands dip low enough on her back to grip her ass, to bring her fully against him with no barriers, and to _move_.

 

Since Apalachicola he’s wrestled with what to do with these feelings; now that he’s admitted them to himself he’s become aware of how they were already there, fully felt, long before he showed up here in Florida. Still, being tucked away from the world like this has made them brighter. He wonders sometimes how she could miss them, and he worries that she doesn’t but is trying to be polite by saying nothing. Should he be picking up on what she’s putting down? Adam has no fucking clue, and he can practically see Preach, McG, and Amir howling with laughter if they could witness him right now. Throw Patricia in there. Hell, Jaz would probably tease him too; he feels ridiculous. Like a teenage boy who has never talked to a girl.

 

What Adam does know is that he wants all of her, but right now the most precious part to him is access. It’d taken everything in him last night not to yell back when she pushed him away over and over again. That’s why Jaz does to him:  she makes him lose control. With her his first emotions almost always win out. Last night the only thing that kept him from letting his frustrations match her own was the way her eyes had never looked so big to him. So he loved her the best way he knew how, by tampering down the fight he wanted to have and by being grateful when she let him in.

 

And in the morning the only thing that is different from every other morning is Adam lingers longer in bed, well, couch. He drops his head to the back cushion of the couch and groans. Today he wants her more than yesterday. He hadn’t known that was possible.

 

“Are you coming or not?” Jaz yells from outside. The door is open and she is using the picnic table to stretch her legs.

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Adam answers. “Don’t get too cocky.”

 

Jaz laughs and Adam cringes at the unintended puns only he knows about.

 

Yeah, this being in love with her is gonna be a riot.

 

***

 

So that’s the thing trauma and grief – but also love – are never linear.

 

For the next week most of their routine doesn’t change. Subtle has never been part of Adam’s relationship with Jaz so he feels awkward about the little changes he does make.

 

He’s noticed that she doesn’t have any photos around the RV so he prints a few he’s got on his iphone:  her and Elijah, one of the team taken in Seville, a sunset captured one twilight when he and Jaz sat on the hood of a Humvee, and one of Patton.

 

That last one reminds Adam it’s been a while since he called his sisters; they’re keeping the dog while he’s in Florida, a job that has turned into a much longer commitment than he’d anticipated. He makes a mental note to call home. He puts the photos in frames he buys at Target, but he remembers glass in the RV isn’t ideal. So he tracks down a craft shop in Tallahassee that cuts acrylic to swap out the glass.

 

He places them around the RV while she’s over at Ivan’s, and when she gets home he waits for her to say something. He waits all through dinner and then when they settle onto the couch like normal he finally bursts out, “Notice anything different?”

 

It takes her a ridiculously long time to notice the photos, and if Adam wasn’t so nervous he’d tease her about her awareness going soft.

 

“I saw them,” she blusters after examining each one, “I just thought you’d put them up for you.”

 

It occurs to him later that missing in all the photos is one of just her and him.

 

He does other things too.

 

He tries making dinner one night, but that makes Jaz think he’s trying to say something about her cooking.

 

“If you don’t like something I’ve got planned, you just have to say so,” she says matter-of-fact, and Adam really just wants to bang his head on the table.

 

It’s already a given that every few days he replaces the flowers in her vase with a new store-bought cluster so even the most obvious gestures won’t work for him. He considers writing her a note and leaving it for her to find on that mound of pillows, but knowing his luck it’d get lost in the nooks and crannies of her bed. Also, that feels even more 14 year-old-ish than his other futile attempts.

 

It’s only when he surprises her with a day at the gun range does Adam think she gets an idea of what he’s trying to do. Not the romantic gesture part, but the realization that her happiness is important to him.

 

“Thank you for being willing to spend a day getting your ass kicked,” she says on the car ride home that evening. She snickers and he pretends to be put out, but that only lasts a moment.

 

“You’re welcome,” he replies as they pull into the RV park. They park Ivan’s Camry in front of his little white house, and Adam drops the borrowed keys into the mailbox.

 

When he turns back to her, Jaz tilts her head.“What?”

 

“Would you be up for going dancing?” Jaz hurries the next bit, “Ivan invited us the other week. There’s a salsa club he likes. I know you don’t dance, but I think it’d be fun if we went. Even just to people watch.”

 

He takes her hand and that seems to settle her nerves.

 

“Yes,” he says and her grin is everything.

 

***

 

There is one other thing that has changed between them since Jaz’s night terrors returned:  their sleeping situation. Since that night they’ve silently settled on sleeping on the couch. It’s never really addressed between them.

 

One always falls asleep first and the other tucks themselves close enough to feel the press of skin to skin. It never starts out like it did that first night – laid out completely on the couch. Adam tells himself that position is too dangerous, but he never puts on a t-shirt because the warmth of her skin against his feels too good.  

 

But the night terrors are back and in the darkest parts of the night Adam wakes up to her cries.  He shifts back to that first position. Sometimes she wakes fully and other times she doesn’t. Every time she presses her nose against his breastbone and it tickles before it draws up the deepening pool of _want_ he knows is growing.

 

The strategic part of Adam knows he’s setting himself up to do something impulsive; the smart thing to do would be to retreat. But unlike anyone else, Jaz has always had the power to untether him. So he tightens his arms around her and can’t bring himself to regret it.

 

***

 

The night they go dancing, Jaz feels no guilt at enjoying Adam’s reaction when she comes out of the bathroom. He’s buttoning up his shirt when she comes out barefoot, dressed, and her hair up on her head.

 

“You look -,”

 

Jaz grins, “I look good.”

 

Adam swears under his breath and Jaz goes back to her closet to find her heels. She grins to herself when she hears, “Fuck,” when she turns around and he sees the back of her outfit or lack thereof.

 

“Is that even a dress?” he calls out, “It looks more like half a shirt.”

 

“It’s a romper,” she calls out from her closet. She finds the black sandals bought for tonight. She sits down on the couch to put them on. They raise her to his eye level and from the way his eyes linger on her legs Jaz is pretty sure they’re doing her all sorts of favors.

 

She holds out a hand, “Ready?”

 

Adam rolls his eyes, but he lets her tug him out the door and into the night.

 

***

 

They carpool with Ivan to the club and it’s a bit tense in the car. Ivan doesn’t like Adam and Adam doesn’t care. Jaz knows if Ivan only knew how more muddied things had become between her and Adam in the last week he’d probably pull over and make them talk about it. She takes a steadying breath and tells herself Ivan doesn’t have all the information. If he did he’d understand why it wasn’t about deserving better. She and Adam made their choices and what they deserved wasn’t the most important part of their lives. Duty was.

 

There’s a line at the club, but Ivan in his white shirt with painted flamingos doing some sort of cancan gets them waved right in. It’s then as they walk into the bar that Jaz realizes this isn’t just a salsa club, but a gay salsa club. It doesn’t bother her and she knows it won’t phase Adam, but she does laugh a bit when she realizes she’s one of the few women in the room. At least, one of the few choosing to present as a woman.

 

On the job she’s forever conscious of not drawing attention to any overt traditional femininity she has. When in the field her hair is pulled tight and even off duty she wears the muscle tanks common to the men around her. But here she’s never felt so decidedly female. She can already feel her hips ready to sway and her breasts peak against the silk of the romper, which certainly doesn’t allow for a bra or much left to the imagination.

 

“This is gonna be fun,” she grins at Adam and he responds with an indulgent smile and a light hand on her exposed lower back. The warmth of his hand on her bare skin causes Jaz to flush. She can feel the callouses on his palm along her spine and she gives a shaky exhale.

 

Ivan takes them around the clusters of tables and introduces them as, “Elijah’s other family,” and Jaz almost tears up. They settle at a table near the dance floor and it only takes a few minutes before Ivan is pulled up by a man whose shirt is open all the way to his navel. Her middle-aged lawyer friend is surprisingly light on his feet and she laughs as he lets the other man spin him. Adam returns to their table with a round of drinks and settles down next to her so he only has to turn his head slightly and his mouth is near her ear. His arm is stretched along the back of her chair and she leans into it.

 

“I’ve never felt more like the epitome of the straight white male,” he observes. Jaz arches an eyebrow and appraises his blue button down tucked neatly into dark jeans, the scuffed boots that he considers dress shoes, and his neatly trimmed beard.

 

“Oh, definitely.”

 

He chuckles, “You should get out there.”

 

Jaz shrugs, “I’m good right here.”

 

***

 

Adam’s phone rings but he silences it without looking at who is calling.

 

“You’re not gonna get that?” Jaz asks.

 

“They can wait.”

 

She seems surprised and it occurs to Adam that her surprise is warranted. For him, ignoring the phone is a luxury of leave. But it’s more than that. A gay salsa club isn’t his normal watering hole, but he’s happy here with Jaz’s bare back pressed against his forearm, the warmth of tequila working its way through him, and the steady rhythm of the music.  

 

They watch the people fly across the floor and Jaz leans toward him, “Elijah would’ve loved this.”

 

“I remember he used to take you and McG out whenever we had a down night.”

 

“He and I got McG laid so many times. That man is forever in my debt. We were perfect wingmen.”

 

“You guys always looked like you had fun.”

 

Jaz turns so she’s facing him completely, “You know you were always invited.”

 

Adam shrugs, “You guys needed to be able to let lose without your CO hovering.”

 

“You know we’re capable of complex thinking,” she says, “when we’re in the field you’re our CO and on a night like this, you can just be Adam. I can hold the two in my head without falling apart.”

 

Adam’s heart skips a beat when she switches from _we_ to _I,_ and it makes him brave enough to ask a question that he wanted to pose since he showed up in Florida.

 

“So that’s what I am to you – one of your guys?”

 

Her eyes widen and a treacherous part of Adam panics because he can’t take the words back. She sits up and turns completely in her chair so their knees knock and their eyes lock.

 

“Want to dance?”

 

The invitation comes from the same man who first pulled Ivan onto the floor. Adam nudges Jaz’s knee with his own, “Go,” he says. She looks at him, confusion clear in her eyes, and he nods. He knows he’s taking the coward’s way out, but right now he feels so outside his comfort zone he wants to flip a table. This is the problem with civilian life, he thinks, there’s just too many damn emotions.

 

Jaz lets herself be escorted onto the dance floor, and Adam downs the rest of his drink. The tequila burns more than he’d care to admit, but it does the job. Adam watches her out there on the floor. Her partner is explaining something to her, and then his hands are on her, and she’s moving those hips Adam has woken up pressed against every morning this week, those hips he wants his hands on. Adam Dalton doesn’t get jealous, at least that’s what he tells himself, but as he goes to the bar to get another drink he can taste the regret. It’s left him parched and desperate.

 

***

 

Jaz’s partner is a kind man named Ricky, and he really just wants to dance. He explains the basic steps to her because she tells him it’s been a while since she’s been salsa dancing with Elijah.

 

“You’re his family,” Ricky says as he places a hand on her waist. “He talked about you often.”

 

“Hopefully only the good things.”

 

“Sometimes,” Ricky says diplomatically. Jaz laughs despite herself, and she lets him lead her into the dance. He turns her and she glimpses their table empty. Adam is gone, and Jaz feels a flash of anger. He’s the one who asked the question, and he’s the one stalking off to brood?

 

She sets to letting the pulse of the music and flash of lights being her escape from the catch in her throat when he asked it. _So that’s what I am to you – one of your guys?_

Being part of an Omega team requires a pretty evolved self-awareness so usually even when Jaz is mad she is aware of the contours of her feelings. But now she doesn’t know what she feels. Part of her is mad because he put into words something that had gone unspoken between them, and part of her is bewildered because she thought it was just her.

 

This is Adam Dalton. The most assured man she’s ever known. Even Elijah and McG, for all their swagger, she knew, had the vulnerability underneath the joking and flirting. Preach and Amir were different, quieter and more serious, but she saw their vulnerability through their humility. But Adam – he never made a move that wasn’t strategically thought out and when he did make a move it was always executed with exact intent.

 

So what fucking kind of question is that? And then to disappear before she can even respond?

 

And them? They were a fucking disaster waiting to happen; they’d ruin their careers if the feelings were two-sided. He didn’t need a sniper; he needed a woman who knew how to make a home. Just like she didn’t need a hero; she needed someone who was good at living day-to-day. An accountant or insurance man – someone who wasn’t intimidated by her, but who didn’t take her shot either with a _whoops_ and a shrug. Not that Jaz thought such a man existed, or that she’d find him attractive with his office job and love for things like golf and RV’s. The thought of the RV makes her laugh into Ricky’s shoulder.

 

“What’s in your head, darling?” he says into her ear, but before she can come up with an answer, the music sends her twirling away from him and Jaz is left on her own.

 

_Could he? Could they?_

Then music changes and she feels Ricky let go of her hand. When she turns back to the spot where he was there stands Adam. He laces his fingers through her’s and pulls her flush against him. His hand settles on her lower back – in the same spot as earlier – but this time he pulls as if even now isn’t close enough. His denim jeans scrap against silk and her feet find their lead from his.

 

“I thought you didn’t dance,” she stutters.

 

“You decided I don’t dance,” he says. Their foreheads are pressed together and Jaz licks her lips. “Lily liked to dance,” he says, “so I learned.”

 

Jaz imagines a teenage Adam with his baby sister standing on top of his feet as they circle a living room somewhere in Pennsylvania. She imagines his other two sisters – Sophie and Faith – sitting on the couch making fun of them and throwing popcorn at them with sibling affection.

 

“Why did you ask me that?” Jaz meets his eyes. She’s not going to do it for him. If he wants to make a declaration then let him make it. He’s certainly brave enough.

 

But he doesn’t answer her. Instead, he acts. He stops dancing and holds out his hand.

 

She takes it and later she understands why. He doesn’t want to pull her along. If they’re gonna do this they’re going to do it together.

 

So, Jaz follows him off the dance floor, and past the line at the door onto the street. Adam hesitates for a moment on the sidewalk and then leads them toward an alcove built into the office building next to the club. It’s the darkened entrance of some place that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he swings her around so her bare back is pressed against the glass door. His arms bracket her in and instead of feeling pinned down, Jaz feels let loose.

 

“I want you,” he breathes.

 

She can scarcely believe it so she makes a joke, “It’s the romper.”

 

He presses against her so his hips bite into hers and as he moves with the slightest among of friction, Jaz has to bite her lip to keep from whimpering.

 

“I want _you_ ,” he says again.

 

Her own hands find purchase at the nape of his neck, in that blondish brown hair that sticks up in the mornings and makes him look like a boy. But still she doesn’t move because she needs Adam to do it. He’s the steady one, the one she trusts more than herself sometimes, and she knows him. He needs to be the one to do this.

 

“Do you want me too?”

 

She inhales at the softness of his voice, and she nods. “Too much,” she whispers.

 

He kisses her. It’s not soft or urgent, but somewhere in between – intentional the way Adam Dalton does everything, but there’s an undercurrent when his lips touch hers. For a moment Jaz lifts her hands away from him and when she anchors herself to his shoulders again she can feel him tremble.

 

She makes him tremble.

 

That snaps something in both of them because then he’s cupping her face and teasing the seam of her lips with his tongue. She lets her nails pull him closer and it’s still not close enough. He’s grinding down on her hips and she wraps a leg around his hip. When she does he groans into her neck and kisses his way along her collar bone. His hand runs alongside her rib cage until she shivers and then he palms her breast through the silk of her romper. She whimpers and he returns to her mouth. His beard is not something Jaz would have ever thought she’d love, but it’s so Adam and she shivers at the feel of it against her skin.

 

“Jaz,” Adam breathes and they both open their eyes. She’s never seen his eyes so blue or so desperate.

 

“Take me home,” she says.

 

And then his phone rings. The ring tone is one of the standard ones that comes with the phone, efficient and to the point. It’s such an Adam choice. He pulls it out to silence it, but then he frowns. Jaz sees it’s Sophie, his sister.

 

“Answer it,” she says.

 

Adam does and Jaz has to watch his face break in front of her. It’s something out of her night terrors. He says words, but she doesn’t really hear them. She’s focused on holding tight to him, her hands splayed on his back, anchoring him the way he does her.

 

“It’s Leah,” Adam says once he hangs up. His niece, she recalls, the one who he talked about when he first got to Florida. “She’s missing. Has been for days. They thought she’d just runaway, but now the FBI has been called in.”

 

***

 

What happens next is mostly a memory for Adam:  Jaz tugs him back into the club and gets him water while she finds Ivan, who takes them home. She pulls his go-bag out and fills it with clothes. It doesn’t occur to him until they are at the airport that she’s got one of her own. Ivan drops them off and Adam thinks she’s just getting out of the car to say goodbye. He’s vaguely aware that she called Patricia at home to get tickets an hour before the next flight out of Tallahassee. But then there’s her go-bag on the curb next to his and Jaz is hugging Ivan instead of him.

 

“You don’t have to -,” he starts, but she rolls her eyes and picks up both their bags.

 

He follows her into the airport; it’s miniscule with three gates and on a Friday night only one is open.

 

“Where are we going?”

 

“We’ll fly into Atlanta, and then up to Philly.” Jaz says. She gets them through security and they stand at the gate with only a few other tired business travelers. Jaz is still in her high heels and romper and Adam pulls off the hoodie she put on him back at the RV. He wraps it around her shoulders and zips it up. As he does his hands shake.

 

“She’s thirteen,” he says.

 

“And all those horrible possibilities running through your head right now,” she waits until he meets his eye, “statistically those aren’t this. She’s a happy middle-class teenager in a small town of middle America. Probably she’s mad at her mom or boyfriend and just exceptionally good at hiding when it suits her.”

 

“Lily was thirteen.”

 

Jaz’s breath catches and she doesn’t offer any more words. They stand there at the gate until it’s time to board, and Adam is surprised when they get on the plane that their seats are in business class. A stewardess brings them plastic glasses of wine and hot compresses.

 

“I thought these might help,” she whispers, and Adam wouldn’t be surprised is Patricia had gotten on the phone with the woman to orchestrate every detail. But he only thinks of that later. In the moment he listens to Jaz when she tells him to drink, and he closes his eyes when she presses the warm cloth to the back of his neck.

 

“ Noah’s already got a car rented for us, and Amir will meet us at the airport. We’ll drive to Carlisle and Hannah is taking care of getting us hotel rooms. McG is enroute. I talked to Preach too. He’s gonna get the all clear from his doctor in the morning to travel.”

 

“They don’t need -,” Adam starts.

 

“They want to,” she says firmly. “They’re my guys and they know when I say show up to fucking show up.”

 

She lifts the armrest between them then, and she wraps his arm around her. She presses her nose into his breast bone as if to listen to the beating of his heart, and while everything good Adam took for granted tilts on a precipice, ready to shatter just like it had all those years ago when Lily died, there’s one thing he can anchor himself to. One steady truth:  her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, whatcha think? 
> 
> Hit me up in the comments or over on tumblr: kyrieanne.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These two beautiful idiots...

On their layover to Atlanta, Adam makes use of his phone. He paces as he talks to Leah’s mother, Sophie. Jaz remembers that Sophie is the most like him with that super ability to compartmentalize in high stress situations. He mostly listens, but Jaz can tell from the way he hunches his shoulders that what he hears worries him.

 

Next, he calls their younger sister, Faith, and he finally sits down in the chair next to Jaz. Silently, she hands him a bottle of water, but he shrugs that away. Instead, he tugs her hand and pulls Jaz onto his lap.

 

Jaz’s first instinct is to glance around them to see who might be watching; public displays like this aren’t in her nature. Then Adam leans forward to rest his forehead on her shoulder and she exhales. One hand threads through his hair and she tries just being there – a steadying presence – as he talks to his sister.

 

“Why didn’t she call me right away?” Jaz can’t hear the response, but Adam follows up with, “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

 

Eventually he gets off the phone and Jaz waits.

 

“Talk to me,” she says quietly.

 

Adam rubs the bridge of his nose, “Sophie thought maybe Leah was at her dad’s, but Jim took a whole day to get back to her. It meant Sophie waited to report her missing. We lost the most important window of time.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

Adam continues to recite the facts like a chorus, something they’d all been trained to do. When the situation is too much – to looming and large - focus on protocol.

 

“There’s no boyfriend that we know of and her cell has been turned off for 48 hours. Local authorities are conducting the normal searches:  friends’ houses, the softball field where her team practices, that sort of thing.”

 

“What about your dad?”

 

“She’s not with him. He’s helping Faith with the girls so Sophie can focus.”  

 

Jaz rubs looping circles on his back and searches his face for a reaction; she doesn’t know much about Adam’s dad other than the basics:  son and father are estranged, but his sisters have their own tepid relationships with him since there are granddaughters to consider and they all still lived in Carlisle.

 

“They’ve started a door-to-door search and they’re checking the movements of any registered sex offenders.” Adam dips his head and Jaz’s heart physically aches at the imagined _what if’s_ running through both their minds right now.

 

“I know we see the worst,” she says, “but that’s because we run toward it. The worst isn’t the most likely.”

 

Adam nods, but she knows it’s an empty gesture.

 

“They’re focused on the area where she was walking home from a friend’s place. That was the last time anyone heard from her. She called Sophie to say softball practice got canceled so she’d be home early. The FBI got called in because Leah falls in the ‘of tender years’ category even though there’s no evidence she’s been moved across state line. Sophie thinks -,” Adam’s jaw shifts, “she still thinks Leah ran away as a stunt and she’ll show up any second. She won’t leave the house because she wants to be there when Leah comes home and Faith is watching the other three because, well, she’s scaring them with calm she is.”

 

Through the years, Jaz has never met anyone in Adam’s family, but she’s seen his six nieces grow up through photos and stories. They all have the Dalton blue eyes and that wholesome American girl next door smile. She doesn’t know much about his sisters except Sophie is divorced with four girls – Leah being the oldest – and Faith and her husband have twin girls still in that nebulous toddler stage that Jaz knows nothing about. Adam would never admit it, but Preach swears Top turns into a complete pushover around those girls.

 

“When he thinks about who he’s doing this for,” Preach told Jaz and McG once, “he thinks of them.”

 

Now, waiting for their connection to Philly, Jaz tips her head so she can meet Adam’s eye, “You think it’s something else. I can tell.”

 

“What if this is my fault?”

 

“Because you were in Florida? Even if you had been around you couldn’t have prevented this.”

 

“I know. I’m not talking about that. What if,” his voice shakes, “what if this was Hoffman?”

 

“Adam, he’s dead.”

 

“I know, but he had to know there was a chance he might not survive and he knew our team. He knew about you and Tehran, about Amir’s undercover work. What if he had retaliation plans that would be triggered by his death? And Leah is his way of hurting me.”

 

Jaz chooses her next words carefully. “What’s your evidence?”

 

“What?”

 

“If we were on an OP and one of us had a hunch you’d ask for the evidence. We all know no matter how good we are our sometimes our intuition is wrong,” she frames his face with both hands, “No matter how sure we feel what keeps us smart is matching intuition with evidence. So, if your gut says this is Hoffman, what’s your evidence?”

 

“I…I don’t know.”

 

Jaz leans her forehead against his, “Then let’s not go there until we have a reason too, okay?”

 

He doesn’t answer. The flight attendant announces it is time to board. Jaz stands up and holds out her hand. He takes it and pulls her tightly into his side. He leans on her and she feels a pang in her chest.

 

***

 

When they land in Philadelphia the horizon is rimmed with pink. There aren’t many travelers at this early morning hour. Amir is waiting for them outside, but before they go through the last check point Adam tugs Jaz over to the last gate, which sits empty and dimly lit. He takes her bag from her and sets it next to his on the floor.

 

“Amir’s waiting,” she says.

 

“I know,” he says and he pulls her against him, his arms wrapping tight around her waist.

 

“We should go -,”

 

Adam kisses her. He cradles her head in one hand and runs his other along her back. If they’d been someplace more secluded he’d have done more – touched all of her – but this is what is possible for now. She opens her mouth under him and makes a sound that flips his stomach. It’s the sound of her wanting him, and it spurs his own want.

 

Jaz pulls back before he’s ready and Adam keeps her anchored close to his body.

 

“We’re going to come back to this,” she gestures between the two of them, “We need to talk. About what this is. But until we can I don’t want anyone else weighing in. And I don’t want you distracted from where your focus needs to be. With your family.”

 

Adam wants to counter that she’s his family too, but he recognizes the set of her brow. To her they are something undefined whereas Adam knows what he wants. He’s seen her do this before – set careful parameters around herself - so no one can hurt her too much when they reject her. He was there when it took months of Elijah teasing her about being best friends before she stopped fighting the designation. It was never because she didn’t care, but that she cares too much and that caring churns up _stuff_. It’s not that different than how coming back to Carlisle does the same to him, even though he doesn’t see his dad.

 

They are two very broken people, he thinks, and because he doesn’t have a solution for that right now, he says, “Okay.”  

 

He wants to anchor himself to her because he’s so damned scared and all he can think of is Leah with her pink cheeks and dusty cleats after a softball game, whooping when they won and throwing her glove when they didn’t. Adam is the steady one and never more so than when he is around his sisters. He is terrified he won’t be able to do what he does best without being able to touch and lean on Jaz.  But he lets her go and she takes a step back. Adam knows it’s impossible, but he already feels the loss of her.

 

 

***

 

Amir isn’t alone when he picks them up from the airport. Hannah is there in the passenger seat, and under different circumstances Jaz would have given Amir so much shit when he got out to greet them.

 

“She thought if we need Patricia or the DIA to do anything it’d be good for her to be here,” Amir offers the ready-made excuse as he hugs her.

 

“If that’s what we’re going with – sure,” Adam says and Jaz snorts. She missed _this._

 

***

 

The drive from Philly to Carlisle takes a few hours, and the weariness of traveling all night hits Jaz within minutes. She and Adam are in the back seat, and as the sway of the car starts to lull her to sleep she moves to slide against Adam. Then she remembers she can’t do that here.

 

Top is mid-sentence when she pulls back and he doesn’t pause. Neither Hannah nor Amir seem to notice. Jaz tries to make herself comfortable by leaning against the far door, and just as she falls asleep she feels the gentle pressure of Adam’s shoe against her own. It isn’t the same, but it’s something.

 

At some point, they stop for coffee and doughnuts. Adam wakes her up to see if she wants some. She mutters no and curls around his go-bag, which is acting as a makeshift pillow. She stirs just as they’re getting back on the highway and he hands over her go-to coffee order.

 

“I know to never trust a sleeping Jaz when she turns down coffee,” he teases. She taps her shoe against his in a silent jest. It earns her one of his quiet smiles.

 

Jaz keeps herself awake. She makes conversation with Amir and Hannah hoping Top will let himself sleep too. It works. He sleeps sitting straight up with his arms folded tight across his chest. Jaz catches Amir’s glance in the rearview mirror.

 

“How is he really?” Amir asks.

 

“I don’t know,” is her truthful answer.

 

 

***

 

Carlisle sits at the base of foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, and it has the borrowed shine of a New England town with old brick buildings, historic homes with large lawns, and banners on the street lamps in red, white, and blue.

 

It’s mid-morning when they pull down the main downtown road, and Hannah whistles, “Pretty picturesque.”

 

“Every place has at least some bit that’s postcard worthy,” Adam says. He directs Amir away from downtown and toward the Hampton Inn where Hannah has booked their rooms.

 

They check-in, and Jaz lingers by the car because Adam does too. He talks to Faith on the phone quickly to let her know they’ll be over to Sophie’s shortly. When he says _they_ Jaz tugs on her fingers until the knuckles crack. It occurs to her just then how wildly out-of-place she is here; not only in a place like Carlisle, but alongside Adam in the midst of a family emergency.

 

“Where do you want me?” she asks when he gets off the phone. It’s just the two of them.

 

“With me,” he says as if it were a simple answer.

 

So they leave their bags with Hannah and Amir at the hotel. It doesn’t escape Jaz’s notice the flicker of surprise on Amir’s face when Adam says Jaz is going with him to see his sisters.

In the car, even alone, he doesn’t reach for her hand, and Jaz has to remind herself the distance had been her idea.

 

There are cars parked outside Sophie’s house so they have to park further down the block and walk up the brick sidewalk. Jaz tugs at the bottom of her romper wishing she’d thought to change. She feels ridiculous. She’s walking down a street that looks like a picture out of a magazine in a club outfit and slept in makeup. When Adam stops in front of the biggest house on the street, a rambling pearly white Victorian with black shutters, Jaz chortles.

 

“Sorry,” she says, “it’s just different than a Quonset hut.”

 

“I have the military; Sophie has social status,” he says without malice.

 

Jaz notices the details:  the perfectly manicured lawn, the mud-caked tennis shoes on the stoop, and the stillness. Even in the RV park there was always some noise, but here it feels like the house and the people inside are holding their breath. Adam doesn’t bother to knock. He holds the door open for Jaz.

 

The first thing she thinks of as she walks in is that there is a table in the middle of the foyer.  Adam’s sister is the type of woman who has a foyer large enough for a pedestal table in the center and she the type of woman who puts a vase of fresh flowers on top of it. It’s a silly first impression, but it’s what she thinks until there is a cry and Jaz steps out of the way as Sophie and Faith come running toward their brother.

 

She stands there in her ridiculous romper and Adam’s hoodie, and she balls the cuffs into her fists and soothes her own rising heartbeat by focusing on inhaling _in and out_ , _in and out_ – instead of staring at Adam’s sisters - blonde, blue-eyed, and wholesome – as they run into his arms. Nothing about this moment is about her; a little girl is missing. Still, Jaz soaks up the way he wraps an arm around each sister and pulls them close.

 

“We’ll find her.” Adam’s words are muffled; he says them with his face pressed against Sophie, and Jaz watches as Adam’s sister breaks. Her shoulders shake and he hugs her tight. Faith wraps her arms around her sister too. Jaz tears up and she bites her lip to keep from crying. Over Sophie’s shoulder, Adam meets her eye and mouths, “Thank you.”

 

Jaz isn’t sure what he’s thanking her for, but she doesn’t get a chance to ask him because Faith and Sophie notice their big brother showed up with someone. Jaz lifts her chin when both women turn to look at her; it’s a move out of those early days in her career when she felt pinned under the stare of a CO who only saw a woman.

 

“Adam, you’re forgetting your manners,” Sophie says, “introduce us.”

 

“I’m Jaz Kahn,” she steps forward before he can. It feels important to establish with his sisters that she is the kind of person who can speak for herself.

 

Faith grins, “You’re what’s finally got my brother taking a vacation.”

 

“I know how to take a vacation.” Adam grumbles.

 

“Your Jack London hikes alone in the woods don’t count.”

 

Jaz wants to smile at their banter, but she doesn’t know if that’s allowed. Moments ago there had been tears, now teasing, and then – Sophie takes charge.

 

“I’ll put tea on and we can get to know your friend, Adam.”

 

“Soph,” he starts, “that’s no necessary. I want to go to the station and talk to the cops, the agents, see where we’re at.”

 

“This is your family, Adam. Not your job.” Sophie bites back. She raises a hand to her temple and inhales. They stand there and watch her tremble

 

“He found me,” Jaz blurts out. She knows she shouldn’t speak up. This isn’t her family. She’s as uncomfortable as hell, but Adam wants her here so this is happening. “There was a job. It…it didn’t go the way we planned and I got taken. It was an impossible situation; I thought I’d die. But…he found me.”

 

“Jaz -,”  

 

Jaz ignores Adam and lifts her chin as she meets Sophie’s gaze. She tries to say it as gently as she can, “He found me. Let him find her.”

 

***

 

They go to the station after that and Jaz waits in the lobby because it’s crowded in the conference room. She’s not family after all.

 

Amir and Hannah need the rental car to pick up McG at the airport so they take an Uber to the station and bring her clothes to change into – leggings, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes. She’s glad they don’t ask about Adam’s sisters because she isn’t really sure what she’d say.

 

Jaz reads a book on her phone until her eyes droop. She falls asleep in the middle of the day in one of those hard-plastic chairs. It’s Faith who wakes her up sometime mid-afternoon with a gentle hand to her shoulder.

 

“Adam wanted me to come check on you,” she says.

 

“How’s it going?” Jaz stretches to work a kink out of her neck.

 

Faith drops into the chair next to Jaz. She slides down so her neck rests on the back of the chair and lolls her head toward Jaz. “I think the agents are scared of the combination of Sophie and Adam,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper. “I am.”

 

This time Jaz lets herself laugh. She likes Faith. She’s different than Adam – lighter and more effusive – and for some strange reason she thinks of Elijah in that moment. How those were some of the first things she liked about him too.

 

“Your brother said he has the military and Sophie has social status.”

 

“She’s always been as ambitious as him. Her career of choice was to have the love-match marriage, the beautiful family, and the perfect house, but then Jim turned out to be an ass so she decided to become the perfect single parent without giving up any of the other stuff either. It makes her – inaccessible sometimes. She and Leah – it’s been hard on both of them because Leah’s just as willful. She just doesn’t want the same things as what Sophie imagined for her.”

 

“Leah would call Adam sometimes,” Jaz says. The look on Faith’s face confirms what Jaz suspected. “I didn’t hear what they talked about. But he said Leah felt stuck. Like she didn’t belong anywhere.”

 

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I was really excited for my niece to have her uncle back this summer.” Faith sits up, “For all of us to have him back even if it was just for a little while.”

 

“He just showed up at my door.”

 

Faith nods as if she understands, but Jaz knows she doesn’t. It’s like Ivan saying she deserves better. Neither of them have all the information.

 

Jaz’s stomach growls and Faith stands up. “Let’s go get lunch and you can tell me about all the times you’ve kicked his ass.”

 

“That I can do.”

 

Faith stops in the doorway of the police station and surveys Jaz for a moment. There’s something on the tip of the other woman’s tongue, but then she shakes her head and smiles wider.

 

“Thank you,” she says, “for being here for him.”

 

***

 

It’s after dinner when they leave the station. Sophie and Faith drop them off at the hotel and Sophie calls back to her brother. She gets out of her car and runs into his arms. Jaz takes the copies of the case files he’s holding just in time. Jaz watches again as Adam holds his sister tight and she cries. In the passenger seat of the car, Faith cries. Adam stays steady just like he does.

 

“Let my team take the girls off your hands tomorrow,” he says, “distract them.”

 

“Dad’s been taking care of them.” Sophie self-consciously wipes smudged makeup from under her eyes. She looks at Jaz, embarrassed, “Look at me. I’m a mess.”

 

Jaz wants to tell her about the timen they’d been dropped into Mongolia and rode horses for hours to get home. How she stank and her face was painted green and black. How Jaz can’t believe she’s even wearing makeup and an outfit that actually matches. But she doesn’t because while Sophie Dalton’s world and her own are completely different, Jaz can recognize a coping mechanism when she sees it.

 

“Let us take the girls tomorrow.” Adam repeats, “McG makes for a great jungle gym.”

 

Sophie relents and they say goodbye with one last hug. Just as Adam steps back, Sophie steps up on her tiptoes and whispers something in Adam’s ear. Whatever it is – Jaz can’t guess – because he keeps his features schooled. There is a quick wave goodbye for Jaz and then they are gone.

 

Jaz’s curiosity gets the better of her, “What’d she say?”

 

“Huh?” Adam pretends he didn’t hear the question and Jaz lets him.

 

Inside, McG, Amir, and Hannah are in the hotel lobby sharing a pizza and six pack of beer, and Jaz feels herself exhale. Here are her guys – well, her guys plus Hananh – and despite the circumstances that brought them back together Jaz smiles.

 

“Jazzy are you really living in a motorhome?” McG shouts across the lobby.

 

“It’s got a fireplace,” Adam answers. The two men clap each other on the shoulder, and

McG envelopes Jaz in a hug. When she goes to sit down, Adam pulls the chair out for her and McG tilts his head at her.

 

“Didn’t Amy McGuire teach you to close your mouth,” she says before he can pay any closer attention. This time it’s her foot that finds Adam’s under the table and she’s rewarded when he drops his head and smiles to himself. Amir and McG are fighting over if Hawaiian pizza is an abomination or not, and Hannah asks Adam how it went at the station.

 

Over pizza their team pours over the case files. Preach has yet to be cleared to travel so they call him up and do what they do best – talk it out. There’s no one in the lobby at this point except the desk clerk who has head phones in so they are free to discuss where Leah could be. Jaz waits and eventually Adam does bring up the possibility of Hoffman, but her guys (and Hannah) have the same response:  where’s the evidence?

 

It’s Preach who makes the suggestion that maybe Sophie is right. Maybe Leah really did run away and all the worst-case scenarios the authorities are assuming are only confusing the search.

 

“You did say she was calling you a lot,” Amir points out.

 

“What did you guys talk about?” Hannah asks.

 

Adam tells them what Jaz already knows and her eyes wander to Adam’s phone.

 

“Hey Preach,” she says, “could you get transcripts of her text messages?”

 

“Not without the phone and you said it was turned off.”

 

“I mean transcripts of her text messages with Top. From his phone.”

 

“I’ve already gone through those,” Adam says.

 

Jaz meets his eye, “But you’re too close here. Let’s get the transcripts and let these guys take a look. Amir is good at reading subtext, Hannah’s an analyst, and Preach has teenage daughters. Let them hear Leah in her own words and see if it yields anything.”

 

“I’ll just be the pretty one,” McG pipes up.  

 

“Oh, you’re spoken for,” Jaz grins. “Top already volunteered for you to be a human jungle gym tomorrow when we watch his nieces.”

 

Amir and Preach howl and McG drains his beer. It’s not long after that they disburse for bed and Jaz remembers how tired she is. Being with her guys – trying to think through a problem – has let out the tension of the day spent with Adam’s sisters at the station. It distracts her from thinking too hard about the fact that she is nothing like them – neither polished like Sophie nor effusive like Faith.

 

Jaz knows Adam wants her physically, but she thinks of what she said to him all those months ago:  he’s the only CO who looks at her and doesn’t see a woman first. A treacherous thought snakes its way into her mind as they all walk toward the elevator. She is nothing like the women he’s used to so of course it’s easy for her to be one of the guys. That was perfect when that’s what they were:  partners and friends. But that wasn’t – or was it – who they were now?

 

Jaz knows that is a dangerous trail to wander down and she tries to side step it by telling herself now is not the time. She reminds herself that it’s been less than 48 hours since he asked her that ridiculous question: _so that’s what I am to you – one of your guys?_ and as the elevator doors shut she realizes she never actually answered him.

 

Jaz is sharing a room with Hannah, Amir with McG, and Adam is supposed to share with Preach when he arrives. They ride up in the elevator together and the first stop is the floor for Jaz and Hannah. It means there is no quiet moment alone with him to check-in. All she gets to do is offer a generic wave to the guys there in the elevator.

 

In their room, Hannah doesn’t try to make small talk, which relieves Jaz. They’ve met before, but only briefly. Jaz hadn’t shown up at Patricia’s party and she’d been grounded when Hannah had joined them in the field. They go through the motions of getting ready for bed and Hannah offers only a brief, “Goodnight,” before sliding down to sleep with her back to Jaz. She’s almost asleep herself when she gets his text.

 

_Dalton: You asleep?_

 

Jaz smiles in the dark.

 

_Jaz: Not any more._

_Dalton: I miss you._

_Jaz: We spent all day together._

_Dalton: You know what I mean._

_Dalton: You should come up here._

_Jaz: Adam…_

_Dalton: Jaz…_

Jaz bites her lip. There are a million reasons she shouldn’t go and the one pressing on her heart is fear. Her training taught her how to name the emotion when it took over like this: winding its way through her limbs, her lips dry, and her brain whirling. She knows the sensation of what fear feels like, and she knows the only countermeasure is to act braver than you are.

 

_Jaz: What’s your room number?_

He sends it to her immediately and that lets her exhale. She waits there for what seems forever listening to Hannah’s even breathing until she finally gets up the nerve to get up. She forgoes shoes and just takes her phone and room key. She slips Adam’s hoodie back on and with as much ninja skill as she can she slips out of the room and into the elevator.

 

The ride up is short, but she rocks on her heels. She knows that Amir and McG are on the floor between her’s and Adam’s, but still she is careful to check that the hallway before she ventures toward his room. She feels ridiculous; they’re two single adults who have spent weeks and months practically living together. But still there is a thrill that shivers down her spine as she knocks lightly on his door. When he opens it wearing that Army t-shirt, basketball shorts, barefoot, his hair already dented from laying down, and looking at her like _that_ – that shiver leaps in her.

 

***

 

Adam has made up his mind and unmade it a dozen times today about what he is going to do at the end of it. He can feel the access she’d given him to her in Florida slipping away. When he said he wanted _her_ it wasn’t just about sex, but the words get stuck in his throat because there’s no plan behind them. He realizes he needs to tell her how he feels. _I want you_ is a start, but there’s so many other things to be said between them.

 

 _Them_ would challenge their whole livelihood. The team would need to change and by being with her he’d probably see less of her at first. She has years of missions and accomplishments to complete. He needs time to think it out – whether he could be happy doing something else so she could stay with the guys – if there is a CO he trusted to see her first as a solider. The variables spin out in his brain.

 

He thinks of Leah and how much she had wanted to win that soft ball game all those weeks ago. It was just a game; the stakes weren’t anything like what he and Jaz face on a daily basis. Still, he finds himself reliving that memory of his niece. It was a teenage girl softball game, but Leah wanted to win that game with more fervency than he’s seen some adults live their whole lives.  Adam doesn’t know which kind of living takes more bravery:  the one spent fighting or the daily one?

 

He doesn’t reach an answer because that isn’t how questions like that work. He does make up his mind though when they get to the hotel and Jaz slots her tennis shoe next to his under the table. She turns so ankle brushes his calf and it’d made him smile.

 

It also reminded him of something he said to Leah the last time she called him. It’d been after Apalachicola. She asked him about Jaz and what made her a good solider. He’d said a lot of things, but he ended with how she makes people smile.

 

“That’s, like, the most cliche thing the world,” his niece had groaned.

 

“Not if you’re a soldier,” he countered, “we see a lot of stuff that isn’t pretty so being able to make your fellow soldier smile is important to a good team.”

 

What he hadn’t said was that Jaz didn’t get stuck in her head like he does. It’s what made her and Villans such good friends in the beginning. When she gave Amir a hard time or talked smack with McG or teased Preach about his dad jokes – she was keeping them all sane. He thinks of the night he showed up at the RV:  she’d been dancing in her kitchen with red painted toes listening to the rain fall. And after he blustered into her happy respite in an RV park she’d made room for him. The thing about her that frustrates him the most at times – how her emotions are right there on the surface and how sometimes that makes her impulsive, reckless, outspoken to a default – is also his favorite thing about her.

 

So tonight when she presses her ankle against his leg and he can feel the heat of her skin through his jeans, Adam makes up his mind to follow her lead and not over think it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ::ducks:: 
> 
> Hit me up in the comments or over on tumblr: kyrieanne.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The calm before the angst...

Jaz kisses Adam. She steps across the threshold of his room and twines her arms around him. Her lips are parted and he can feel her press upward – onto her tiptoes – and he catches her around the waist to hold her right there against him. She is strength and curve, and he feels his whole body react to her.

 

This is what he’d been wanting all day whenever fear choked him. It was the press of Jaz’s hands on his shoulders, anchoring him, and it was the flutter of her breath against his cheek as he sucks at her pulse point.

 

Adam follows her lead, swinging her around to press her against the wall, and she mumbles something about the door against his mouth so he kicks it shut. This makes her laugh and he smiles against her lips.

 

“Hi,” he says without pulling back to look at her. She says hi in return just before pulling him back to her lips.

 

They make out against the wall of his hotel room like teenagers. She tastes faintly of the cider they’d been drinking down in the hotel lobby, and he teases the seam of her lips asking for more of her. She yields to him – not just her mouth -- but all of her as she sighs into him. It sends a thrill through him that this strong, capable woman trusts him enough to be held, kissed, pressed, _wanted_ by him.

 

Adam slides the zipper of her hoodie down and she shrugs out of it. A thrill goes through Adam when he realizes she’s in nothing more than a tank top and sleep shorts. His palms one breast and watches as her nipple pebbles against the cotton. She’s watching his face and when he bends to kiss her breastbone, she rakes her nails through his hair. He groans and she hums with delight.

 

His hands follow the curve of her back and then hip and then down the length of her legs. Her skin is smooth and he can feel the muscles flex under his palms. She hikes one leg around his back and he tugs the other up too so that she’s held up by his hands moving over the curve of her ass. He rocks against her just as her teeth tug on his lower lip, a gentle playful tug. This time it’s Jaz who groans and it spurs him to press harder. Still, it isn’t enough.

 

“I know I’m giving mixed signals,” she breathes as he pulls on her earlobe with his teeth.

 

Adam chuckles and arches his back so that she feels the length of him pressed at her center. “Does it feel like I care?”

 

Jaz returns the favor – pressing - and Adam drops his face into the curve of her shoulder. He shudders at the warmth and steadiness of her.

 

She grins into his cheek, “Not at all.”

 

They stay perched on that precipice for a long moment. Her fingers idle in his hair and he adjusts his grip on her lower back so his palms span the whole of her.

 

“Adam,” she pulls back, “when did this start for you? The wanting?”

 

She skims a finger along his collar bone and her eyes drop down to watch her hand when she says it. He frowns. She’s not looking at him, and a tremble runs through him. It’s from what this could mean – the wholeness of who they could be together – and the reality of how unfair it is to both of them to do this now. Not with Leah missing. Not as a substitute for actually telling her how he feels.

 

That is what catches in Adam’s throat.

 

The words he hasn’t said and what they’d mean for both of them if she feels the same. He owes it to her to have a plan – to have thought this out before he tips both their worlds over. He sees the nervousness in what she doesn’t do. There’s playfulness, but then now in this moment when there should be nothing between them there is. It’s more than the layers of clothes. It’s the words and complications he’s been avoiding since Apalachicola. That had been the gift of that RV and the friendliest park in Tallahassee, Florida. It’d been their own quotidian existence, and Adam knows the only thread running between his real life and that quixotic one had been _her_.

 

But how can he put that on her without a strategy for what it would mean – for her career, for their team, and for the fact that she makes him tremble? What if she chooses not him? He still has to live for the reality that he wants her, and for a soldier like himself want is more dangerous than need. The army accounts for need; it makes little room for want. Especially between a CO and a woman. Wanting her feels dangerous.

 

Adam thinks of Leah and how badly she’d wanted to win that softball game. That question he’d been turning over all day filters back up. Which life requires you to be brave:  the one spent fighting or the daily one? The life of teenage girls and RV parks, of mothers trying to raise tiny humans, and found families like Ivan’s at that gay salsa club. He thinks of the blue vase Jaz bought and what it would be like if week after week – every few days – one of the most important things he did was fill it with flowers for her?

 

He has no answers and really none of that existential shit matters when he’s holding this woman – this beautiful, strong woman – in his arms and she asked him a question.

 

“You don’t have to -,” She starts. She’s still looking at her finger skimming his skin.

 

“Since Bahrain.”

 

This gets her to look up at him and Adam moves so she rests on his thighs and he can cup her face with both hands.

 

“That was two deployments ago.”

 

“I know.”

 

“And I pissed you off.”

 

“I know,” he repeats. “You and Elijah pulled some stunt.”

 

“It wasn’t a stunt,” she argues, “it was the plan, but then you changed the plan and the comms didn’t work.”

 

“So you say,” he arches an eyebrow. “I heard Vallins confirm the change in orders.”

 

“Well, I don’t remember it that way,” she says with chutzpah that makes Adam smile.

 

“That right there,” he locks his gaze with her own and he’s never seen her eyes so wide, “that look on your face is the same one you had in Bahrain daring me to counter you and when my back was turned you said something that made me smile. And I wanted you. I wanted to shake you and gather you up in my arms at the same time. It drove me crazy.”

 

He can see she’s holding back a smile, and he kisses her to draw it out because if he can end today with her happy then facing tomorrow and the search for Leah will be bearable.

 

“Well, you can be equally infuriating yourself,” she says when he pulls back.

 

For that reason, he makes a decision with her there in his arms, both of them trying to catch their breath, alone in a hotel room with no one to consider but each other. Adam is not a puritan by any means; fucking is fucking and making love is making love. He wants both with Jaz, but always – no matter the woman or the kind of sex – Adam prides himself on being honest. He doesn’t whisper sweet nothings unless he meant them. He doesn’t make promises he couldn’t fulfill, and when on deployment he avoids personal questions with a woman that he couldn’t answer. Those were easy truths to avoid, however, and none of them applied to now and how he feels about her.

 

“Jaz -,” he starts.

 

“I know,” she finishes. “We should talk first and with everything – now isn’t the time.”

 

He licks his lips, “Yeah.”

 

He lets her go and she drops to the floor. Adam keeps her there framed in by both his arms and rarely does he think of her as small but in that moment barefoot and with her hair piled on her head he does. He knows it is selfish of him to ask, but he does anyways.

 

“Can you stay? Even if we don’t…um…you know…”

 

“Have sex?”

 

He laughs. If any of the guys could see him stuttering like a teenage boy with Jaz they’d never let him live it down.

 

“Yeah,” he says, and then he finds his words again, “I want to hold you.”

 

Her eyes slide toward the queen bed he’d been in when she knocked.

 

“You know we’ve only ever slept together on that couch,” she says. She smiles and Adam feels like he can breathe again. “An actual bed might be nice.”

 

“I’m game if you are.”

 

So that’s what they do.

 

He takes her hand and leads her over to the bed. She crawls over the side he’d chosen and pulls back the blankets. There are four pillows and she steals a fifth from the second bed.

 

“Hotel pillows are notoriously terrible,” she says.

 

He smiles and starts to crawl in after her, but she stops him with a hand to his stomach. She’s on her knees in the middle of the bed. She fists his t-shirt with both hands and tugs it up over his head.

 

“You never sleep with a t-shirt on.”

 

Adam huffs, “Call it self-preservation.”

 

She skims his shoulders, the curve of his ribs, and down to the band of his shorts. “What about all those other nights? In the RV?”

 

Adam isn’t ready to tell her everything, but to this he can admit. “It was an excuse to touch more of you.”

 

He crawls onto the bed so they’re both kneeling in the middle. His hands find her skin, hot and smooth, underneath her tank top. He’s tempted to tug her shirt up and off, but if he does there really won’t be a stopping point. So instead he kisses her softly and she follows him as he lays down. 

 

She ends up sprawled almost completely a top of him. She scoots down his body so her head is over his heart and he groans as his cock twitches in anticipation. He can feel her grin into his skin and for that he arches his back so she can feel him and his want even more.

 

“We’re officially idiots,” she says against his chest and they both laugh. Silence settles between them and it’s comfortable. He’s grateful for the little ways they already know each other. It makes tonight sweeter, he thinks.

 

“Tell me about Leah,” she says and he does.

 

He tells her how she’d been born between deployments so he had actually gotten to be there – though not in the room thankfully – Jaz laughs when he shudders. She points out he’s been in much bloodier situations than a perfectly healthy baby being born in an American hospital, but he reminds her when it comes to his sisters he’s not sane when one of them is anything but safe and happy. She hugs him tighter when he says that.

 

“She was so loud,” he whispers. “I watched her in the nursery through that glass window cry and turn red. Already fighting the world. Just like Sophie. Though Soph and Leah would never admit it.”

 

Jaz turns her head so her chin rests on his breastbone. “Mothers and daughters can be complicated,” she says.

 

More stories tumble out in quiet whispers as their hands skim over skin. It’s a slow, sweet torture because the want never ceases. It only ebbs like the tide. They talk about his family:  of his childhood in Carlisle, how Lily made all of them laugh, and what it is like to come back after deployment.

 

“It’s home for them,” he says.

 

They lie side-by-side not touching and he closes the gap with a hand to her back. Their lips brush and her hand skims his beard. She smells like the salve she puts on, a mixture of lemon and lavender. He deepens the kiss and is rewarded with a whimper from her as their feet entangle. Adam shifts so he hovers over her and works his way down her neck to the vee of her tank top. She gasps as he bites her breast through the cotton.

 

“You’re not playing fair,” she whispers.

 

“You’re the one who still has her shirt on,” he mumbles and she laughs. 

 

He scoots down so he can hike up her tank top and kiss the sensitive skin beneath her rib cage. She threads her fingers through his hair and tugs. The want in his cock is almost unbearable and he tongues her hip bone.

 

“Remind me why we’re not having sex?”

 

Adam raises up on both elbows, “Cause we need to talk.”

 

Jaz settles into her pillow with both arms tucked behind her head, “It’s almost sunrise. All we’ve done is talk.”

 

He leans his chin on her stomach and notes he likes where they’ve ended up – him cradled between her thighs, her looking at him with that easy affection she’s so good at, and him feeling free to just be.

 

“I want our first time to be about us,” he says, “not about escape.”

 

“I promised I won’t tell,” she grins.

 

“Tell what?”

 

“That you’re a damn romantic.”

 

After that, Adam explores lower. He cups her through her sleep shorts and when he finds her wet and wanting it takes all the military discipline he can muster not to go further. Instead, he rubs the cotton – their eyes locked, blue sinking into brown -- until she cries out. It’s not a real orgasm, but he can feel the way it ripples through her.

 

As she catches her breath he kisses down her legs until he gets to her knee. There are scars there and one in particular catches his eyes in the dim morning light that filters into his hotel room.

 

“How come I don’t know about this one?” he circles it with his finger.

 

She pulls away from him, folding her legs up, and he follows. They are side-by-side now, and he pulls her leg over his hip so that he can rub his calloused fingers over the scar. She lets him do this and he waits. Her own hands trace the muscles along the plane of his stomach, scratch his ribs, and end up tracing his collar bone. It’s the same gesture as earlier, when she asked him about wanting her, and while he can’t decipher every emotion flickering across her face, he does know the wisdom in patience.

 

“We’re not here for me,” she whispers, “Leah is missing.”

 

“How come I don’t know about this one?” he repeats.

 

“You do,” she says, “it’s in my file.”

 

“No, it’s not.”

 

Her eyes flicker up to meet his. “Don’t think I didn’t notice the way you talked about Carlisle as home for them. Not you.”

 

“Jaz.”

 

She lifts a shoulder, “Home life wasn’t great.”

 

His hand tightens over her knee at the implication. The scar is round, the shape of a cigarette, and he knows if the hot ember was pushed into the skin there at the juncture of her knee it’d been done to _hurt_. Anger pulses through him. It’s a white anger – the kind where there is no shadow of a doubt about justification or degree.

 

“Don’t,” she whispers.

 

Adam blinks. He swallows that hot white anger, and what he sees when his gaze focuses are her eyes large. Tears brim and he feels a gaping hole open up in his chest.

 

“Don’t pity me.”

 

“Jaz.”   
  
“Please.”

 

He gathers her to him, cradling her with as gently as he knows how, and he presses his forehead to her own. His fingers catch the tears before they have a chance to fall.

 

“I want you,” he says, “ _all_ of you.”

 

“I hate coming back after deployments,” she confesses. “I don’t have anyone. Or anywhere.”

 

Her fingers still along his collar bone, and Adam tugs them down so her palm is open over his heart, “You have me,” he whispers. 

 

She kisses him and it’s like the that first kiss when he opened his hotel room door hours ago:  hot, branded, and all-consuming. He falls with her into the sensation of skin, hands, and lips. Even if it is through her clothes he touches all of her, and when she holds him in her palm, hot and heavy, he loses all coherent thought.

 

“Fuck, Jaz.”

 

“I’m glad by the way,” she says as she moves her hand over his cock and through his shorts the friction is never enough. “that we’re waiting until it can be just us.”

 

“I take it all back.” He says it with enough humor that she smiles against his lips and Adam can’t remember a night with a woman where he’s smiled this much.

 

She pulls back, “What do you do during deployments?”  

 

His eyes go cross-eyed, “What?”

 

The heat of her hands are gone and he’s staring at a very matter-of-fact Jaz instead of the panting woman he’d held in his arms a moment ago.

 

“I mean McG gets some every chance he can and Preach has his standing call with his wife. Amir is too new. I haven’t figured him out. But he’s got Hannah now…” She furrows her brow, “but I’ve never heard you. And those walls aren’t that thick.”

 

He huffs, “I’m a professional Jaz.”

 

“So you pay for it?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then I don’t know what that means.”

 

He kisses her hard and fast. “The sun’s up,” he says.

 

She twists in his arms toward the hotel window where light spills through the curtains.

 

“Fuck,” she says, “I bet Hannah is one of those early risers. She’s gonna know I didn’t sleep in my bed.”

 

“Honey, everyone is gonna know you didn’t sleep,” he rubs his beard on her neck. She squirms in his arms but he holds her fast. His hand trails to her center and he finishes what he started earlier. Like teenagers, he makes her shudder and gasp his name by rubbing her off through her clothes. He knows it’s a technical game they’re playing – fooling around but not having sex, living together in an RV but not calling it that, and confessing to one another without the words for the feelings rooted in each action.

 

But the sun is up and his niece is missing. For now – this night is what they have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo, when I said slow burn I meant it. ;) 
> 
> I had a hellacious week and this (mostly) fluffy chapter was what I was capable of. Plot is gonna have to wait until next chapter. Thank you for sticking with me. 
> 
> Like always, I ADORE hearing from you - either in the comments, on tumblr (kyrieanne), or now on twitter (kyrieanneflails).


	9. Chapter 9

The look of panic on Amir’s face when he sees Jaz is almost enough to make-up for the panic in her chest. Almost. He’s bare-chested with his pants unbuttoned and a trail of hair that runs from his navel and down. It’s a confirmation to Jaz that attraction is particular because objectively running into a tousled Amir, his pants hanging low on his hips, and the shadow of a night definitely spent not sleeping on his face – objectively she can appreciate the arousal said sight might bring – but in that instant for her there’s nothing but panic. 

She had been about to slide her key card into her hotel room door when it opened and there was Amir with yesterday’s shirt looped over one arm and a half-clad Hannah behind him. 

“Jaz.” 

“Amir.” 

“This…,” he sighs as he realizes pretense is impossible, “this is exactly what it looks like.”

He glances over his shoulder at Hannah and she just rests her chin there. It draws a smile out of him and Jaz feels a pang in her chest. It’s the exchange of two people in sync with one another, physically and emotionally. 

“We figured since you weren’t sleeping here…,” Hannah grins. 

The implication hangs in the air and Jaz feels the flush of irritation in bloom in her chest. If it had come from Amir it’d been different; he’d have earned the right to tease her. Same with McG or Preach. But Hannah didn’t know her and as a woman in the field…

The thought trails off because Jaz is standing there in Top’s hoodie and sleep shorts wrinkled from him making her come with just his hands and some cotton. 

She blusters. “I was taking a walk.” 

She resents the knowing look they give one another, but the feeling draws out another emotion she isn’t sure what to do with: Amir is one of her guys. 

Would she have told him she spent the night – a glorious night – tucked in Adam’s arms? No. She’s not the simpering kind. But she thinks of their cooking lessons and the way Amir took Jaz at face value. When her request to learn to cook drudged up clear emotions – ones about mothers and daughters – he hadn’t pushed. She asked to learn to cook and so he taught her. The same was true with McG and Preach. When they asked what she had planned for leave they’d accepted her non-answer. All of it rolled into one simple haven for Jaz: her guys are there wherever she is – whether it be in the middle of Tehran or caught up in feelings she’s embarrassed to have – they stand there with her. They find her. 

So to see his slow smile echo Hannah’s causes Jaz to feel left out and she doesn’t like the pettiness in her limbs. It makes her want to shake out her hands. She’s not that girl, and she doesn’t want Amir. Rather, she wants…she doesn’t know how to put it into words. All she knows is that the sight of this happy couple, one half of which is her chosen family, makes her feel alone. 

“I need to take a shower,” she says as she pushes past them and whatever looks are shared between them Jaz doesn’t want to see. It belongs to them. 

***

There’s this strange line to walk when doing the kind of work Jaz does. It’s one between awareness and anger. 

You can’t see what she sees and not be angry. Angry at how power always climbs over the powerless and how Lady Justice is blindfolded under the guise of impartiality, but in reality, it means she misses so much. Jaz misses Elijah because in the wake of her anger he made her laugh. Since he died she’s had to find that ability within herself or go crazy. 

But anger is just as blind as justice. It is what tempts her to pull the trigger on a mission when their orders aren’t to kill, but to capture. It’d be so easy for her to make the final decision, to be the justice she knows is so elusive. She thinks of what Adam said after he killed Hoffman. 

“I was glad I got to be the one who put a bullet in his brain. I don’t want to be that person.” 

He’d said it in that hospital and she’d looped her arms around him not just to offer the anchor of another person, but to say me too. She doesn’t want to be the kind of person whose greatest confidence in life is who she has chosen to kill. She wants to be sure about better things than that: in the people she loves and who love her back, that she has a place to call home, and that despite the violence, she’s done more good than harm. 

Awareness is much harder than anger. Anger feels good. Awareness leaves her feeling the distance between who she is and who she wants to be. 

So in the wake of her night with Adam, Jaz feels the uncomfortable sensation of awareness. It’s like the sting of realizing you’ve sunburned; everything hurts. She climbs under the pelting hot water of her hotel shower and she thinks of Leah. It’s a random thought, but she can see the teenage girl in her mind. She’s got Adam’s blue eyes, and Jaz pushes her hair off her shoulders so it leans down her back as she feels the tremor of feelings rise up in her chest. 

As a sniper it’s so easy to think she is the final solution, but then she is here and she can’t fix anything. It doesn’t matter how angry she is for Adam or Leah. She can’t make it better with the pull of a trigger. Rather, her guys (and Hannah) are here. They have gathered and she is part of the whole. This soothes out some of irritation she’d felt at Hannah’s knowing grin this morning. So in the shower, Jaz tells herself she is here to be part of the whole. 

When he’d found the scar on her leg – the same scar Arthur in Tehran had circled with his thumb – she’d wanted to crawl out of her skin. She’d pulled away from him and he’d followed her. The awareness in his eyes of her truth – that her father had hated her, had hurt her, and her mother had let him – left her desperate. She could not handle Adam Dalton pitying her. Because if he did how could she ever be his equal?   
It’s a strange line that Jaz walks between awareness and anger. In the field, anger keeps her focused. It soothes her nerves when there are innocent lives at stake and steady hands is what she needs. It helps her compartmentalize the insane and larger than life. It saves her. 

But on leave, anger turns into awareness. 

In the quiet, stolen moments like this morning she is both petty about Hannah’s treatment of her and honest about her own pettiness. Her confession to Adam had been the truest thing she could have said: “I hate coming back after deployment. I don’t have anyone. Or anywhere.” Coming face-to-face with a giddy Amir and Hannah made her feel even more alone. 

She thinks of the thump of Adam’s heart beneath her palm and his declaration I want all of you. Of McG and his repeated invitations to visit him and his mom. Of the exchange of recipes with Amir and the fact that if she had to tell anyone anything (after Adam) she’d always choose Preach. In the concave of the shower, Jaz tries to catalogue these as facts that she is part of something. 

It works, but only partially. That’s what this story is about. 

***

They take two cars to Faith’s house, which is outside of town on some land. Unlike her sister’s magazine worthy home, Faith’s is messier. There’s a trampoline in the front yard and flower beds that don’t have flowers in them. They pull into the gravel drive and there’s a screech as a bundle of little blond girls of various heights and ages swarm Adam. 

Jaz leans against the car, arms folded, and smiles. There are Faith’s twin daughters still toddling on unsteady legs and Sophie’s younger three all under the age of ten. It’s a lot of hair and pink and muddy legs. Adam swings one of Sophie’s girls up on a hip and crouches down to hug Faith’s two little girls. There’s a the whap and his sisters come outside, barefoot and when they see their older brother their shoulders ease just the smallest bit. 

There’s a round of introductions by Adam and Jaz hangs back as the adults make their way into the house. Faith asks Amir about his cooking; rumor of his skills had reached stateside. Would he be willing to make dinner? McG already has three girls following after him and Jaz snorts because he’s not bad with kids, but he definitely isn’t as confidant as he’d like to appear to be. He keeps pointing to them and she knows it’s because he can’t keep their names straight. Hannah falls in step with Jaz. 

“About this morning -,” she starts. 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Jaz hurries. 

“That’s not what I -,”

But Jaz doesn’t let her finish. She picks up the pace to join McG and his crowd of admirers. 

*** 

Adam sees the rigid posture of Jaz’s shoulders, and he wants to pull her aside to ask what happened. He knows something did. But his sisters want to know if he thinks there’s a chance Leah really did go somewhere on her own volition and when he gets a moment to catch Jaz’s eye she points him back to his family. It’s that silent communication thing they do, but this time it doesn’t ease the heaviness in his stomach. 

His team does what they do best: step up to meet the objectives of the mission. So he gets Preach on speaker phone and downloads the text file extracted from his text messages with Leah over the past weeks. Amir cooks. McG jumps on the trampoline with the girls. Jaz lets one of the twins climb up into her lap, and Hannah pours over the text messages. Patton is there too and Adam nudges the dog toward Jaz. She relaxes a bit when the dog settles at her feet and adjusts his sleeping niece on her lap so she can reach down and scratch his ears. 

Over a pitcher of lemonade, Sophie, Faith, and Hannah read the text messages between Adam and Leah. He tries to make himself useful by folding the mountain of laundry on the other end of the kitchen table. At one point, Hannah looks up at Dalton. 

“She asks about Jaz a lot.” 

Adam shifts to read over Hannah’s shoulder. “I told Leah about her back before I went to Florida. She thought it was cool I had a woman on the team.” 

“Do you think that’s significant?” Sophie looks between Hannah and Adam. The hope in his sister’s eyes hurts. 

Hannah is gentle when she says, “I have no idea.” 

***

For the next three days that is their reality. They have no idea.

The FBI have their investigation, and his team has theirs. He, Hannah, and Amir get a list of Leah’s friends from Sophie, and they make the rounds to the teenage girls of Carlisle. They talk to each girl with her parent and, if they have permission, Hannah talks to each girl alone hoping for a secret to rise to the surface that would explain anything about where Leah might have gone. With each knock on a door he’s hoping for that single piece of information that will give him a reason to believe something other than the worst-case scenarios that loom. He tries to shield Sophie from what those scenarios might be, but his sister insists she hear everything the FBI tells him. 

“I’m her mother,” Sophie snaps one morning, “I’m the one who lost her.” 

He holds her then in Faith’s kitchen, their cups of coffee growing cold, as she cries not just for Leah, but for her other daughters who are waking up with nightmares now that it’s been six days. No matter how much McG keeps them distracted by watching Frozen, jumping on the trampoline, and catching fireflies in the backyard the fact that their sister is missing splinters that childhood peace Adam wants so much for them. 

He sees it in Faith and Sophie too – that unraveling edge when one of the girls ask about Leah. They think of Lily and her brightly sequined dance costumes. They never talked about it, but Adam knows they all tried to protect her from their father’s abuse and mother’s neglect, and Adam had tried to protect all of them. Yet, it’d been she who saw it first-hand. Both of his sisters had been determined to end the cycle for their own daughters; he did his part by keeping the world a little safer. And yet, here they are again. 

Sophie and her girls stop trudging home each night, and they bunk at Faith’s. Each night he stays late to coax his nieces to sleep. He makes up stories about the stars to tell them because too many of the ones he knows are tragedies. 

Then he returns to his own hotel room to find Jaz curled up in the middle of the bed, a ridiculous number of pillows buffeting her body. He strips down to his boxers and pulls her close. He presses his nose into her shoulder to smell the lemon and lavender scent of her skin. Her hand finds the tension at the back of his neck and kneads at the knots with a sleepy hand. 

“Tomorrow will be a week,” he whispers on the third day. “The odds are -,” 

“Shhhh,” she murmurs, “you found me, you’ll find her.” 

***

Leah’s dad Jim shows up on the seventh day drunk and sloppy. His other daughters shout his name and he swings one up on each hip. Jim is happy even when drunk and Adam knows his daughters can’t tell the difference. He steps out onto the porch with Sophie, arms crossed, willing himself to hold back. He isn’t going to kick Jim’s ass in front of his nieces and angry as he is at Jim, Sophie has the right to be angrier. 

He’s proud of his sister because she keeps her voice neutral as she tells the girls their aunt Faith has lunch ready for them. Jim makes a big show of kissing each of his daughters before promising to be right in. Sophie waits until they are in the house and the door is closed before turning to Jim. 

“You bastard,” She shoves the man hard and he sways.

Jim’s brows tighten, “Fuck, Soph. Our little girl is missing.” 

“She’s my little girl. Where the fuck have you been?” Sophie trembles and Adam comes down off the porch to stand beside her. He doubts she even knows he’s there. “It’s been a week Jim. You won’t answer a damn phone call. The cops had to track you down in a bar. Then you show up here drunk. You drove here like that. You don’t get to call her anything. You weren’t here.” 

“Don’t pretend I’d be welcome.” Jim spits. “Not with your brother around. Hell, your own father isn’t even allowed to be here. You know your pop’s called me drunk and crying every night since Adam showed up,” Jim spits and it lands in the dirt near Adam’s boot. “We’re fucking He’s a second-class citizens in our own family. So get off your high horse, Sophie. It makes you look like a bitch.” 

Adam inhales sharp and it takes everything he has to reign in the rage beating in his chest like a rapid staccato. He steps forward and puts a hand on Jim’s chest where Sophie had shoved him. “You’re leaving,” he says. 

Jim swings at him and Adam side steps out of the way easily. The momentum of his punch throws Jim’s balance and he topples to the ground. Adam crouches near him, his voice low, “You’re leaving and you’re going to stay away from my sister and her daughters until you can get your addiction under control. As long as you blame me for keeping you from your family you’re gonna end up like my old man, a pitiful addict who wastes his spot here on this earth.” 

He hauls Jim up and fishes the man’s car keys out of his pocket. 

“Call a friend. Walk home. I don’t care, but you’re not getting behind the wheel of a car. Now get,” he points toward the long, winding county highway at the end of Faith’s yard. “Your car will be in the City Hall parking lot by tonight. Keys will be in the glove compartment box. Don’t show up here again.” 

Adam backs away keeping his eyes on Jim, who is red faced and has grass sticking to his cheek. He stands there as Jim retreats, and the image of him walking down the road looking like a lost boy the further away he gets, makes Adam think of himself walking down a different county highway, knapsack on his back, on his way to basic training. 

He’d been a boy then, and he’d thought he knew everything. The day he left his mother had been dead for months from a suicide that neighbors called a broken heart in the aftermath of the accident and Lily’s death. His father had been passed out in the living room and his sisters at school. So he walked to the bus station alone and got on that bus to go to basic training a year later than planned. He hadn’t wanted to leave his sisters, but he knew he needed to. If he stayed he’d have killed his father at some point. He knew it then and he knows it now watching Jim walk down the road. At nineteen, Adam had told himself he was doing the right thing. Faith and Sophie had their grandmother and he needed to get his head on straight, figure out how to be who they needed him to be. 

For so long, Adam had been proud of that walk he made alone and on his own. He is still proud. But he thinks of that moment at the hospital after he killed Hoffman when he found himself confessing aloud to Jaz the cold dread curling in his gut: I was glad I got to be the one who put a bullet in his brain. I don’t want to be that person. He remembers the part he hadn’t been brave enough to voice aloud, what would Lily think of the person he’s become? She’d been the brightest and happiest of them all, and she’d given away her affection so easily. With Leah gone, his nieces’ happy childhoods punctured by the hardness of this world, and another man broken from addiction looming over their family Adam has to wonder if all of who he is – all of the sacrifices he’s made – have been for naught? 

After all, they have ended right back where they began. 

***

Hannah calls Jaz, and it’s not until much later that Jaz realizes of all the people she could have called she chose her. 

“I found something,” Hannah says, breathless. “About Leah.” 

It’s too early in the morning. Jaz feels Adam shift beside her as she sits up, the cell phone pressed to her ear.

“Hold on,” Jaz says and she nudges Adam with her elbow. He stretches awake and she puts Hannah on speaker phone. “Go ahead,” she says. 

“One Leah’s friends texted me. I gave them my number when I interviewed them. Just in case. She texted me to say Leah had been writing papers for kids at school and selling them. She didn’t know if was important or not, but I started to text her other friends we interviewed and they all confirmed it. She was making money.” 

The excitement in Hannah’s voice is infectious and Jaz actually feels tears in the corners of her eyes.

“She might have really run off,” Jaz runs a hand through her hair. Next to her Adam is already up and off the bed. “If she was trying to get money instead of just asking her mom for it.” 

“Her friends said she said she was going to buy a plane ticket to Turkey. To go see Adam, but that she said she changed her mind when his deployment was announced.” 

Jaz sees the heaviness on Adam’s face. He’d been pulling on his pants when Hannah said this and he freezes there with his jeans hanging low on his hips.

“I’ll call a friend down in Florida,” Jaz says, “maybe she went there and we missed her.” 

“Let’s hope.” 

Jaz hangs up and she catches Adam’s gaze. She doesn’t know what to do. If Leah being gone has something to do with him she knows how he’ll blame himself. She wants to comfort him, put her arms around him, or at the very least argue with his logic like she had in the airport when he considered Hoffman might be behind this, but he stops her before she can decide how to be there for him. 

“Let’s go,” he says in a clipped voice and Jaz swallows the words in her throat, adding them to the list of things they need to talk about when this is all over. 

 

*** 

The whole team and Sophie and Faith hover over Jaz’s cell phone later that day when they call Ivan. He keeps them on speaker phone as he goes over to the RV to check. Sophie flinches when Ivan calls out Leah’s name. He bangs on the door, but there is no answer. Hannah puts an arm around Sophie and the other woman leans on her. Jaz keeps her eyes fixed to the table. 

“I’ll look around some more,” Ivan says through the phone, “but I don’t think she’s here. I’m sorry.” 

***

Jaz is quiet, but not quiet enough when later she comes upon Sophie crying alone in the kitchen. It’s the middle of the day and she can hear her guys playing red rover red rover with the girls in the back yard. Faith is out there too egging them on and the sound of all that laughter filters through the open kitchen window. It makes this place sound normal and happy. 

But in the gray shadowed light of the kitchen, Sophie Dalton cries. She huddles with both feet on the chair, tucked up against her chest, and Jaz’s first thought is that she looks a mess. In that moment, Jaz decides she likes Sophie. She’s glad Adam has her as his sister. 

“You don’t have to just stand there,” Sophie wipes snot with the back of her hand. 

“I’m sorry.” Jaz doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for. 

Sophie kicks the nearest kitchen chair. “You might as well sit.” 

Jaz does and she inhales. She’s not soft like Hannah, good with smiles and emotions, but she’s smart enough to know when words aren’t sufficient. So they sit there as Sophie tries to steady her breath. It reminds Jaz of what she does when prepping a shot. She schools her body to keep back whatever is hammering in her head and heart. 

Sophie rolls her shoulders, “We argued about you, you know?” 

“You and Adam?” 

“No, Adam was going to do what he wanted to do. I know my brother.” She sits cross-legged in the chair and straightens her posture. “Me and Leah. She used you as an example for why I was a bitch mother. Look at Uncle Adam’s Jaz. She’s a girl and she’s nothing like you. I don’t have to be either.” 

Jaz’s face grows hot. 

Sophie seems to realize then the implication of her words, “Don’t take it personally. She’s thirteen and I’m her mother,” she adds. “If it hadn’t been you as the example it’d have been someone else. As long as it was not me. She needed that.” 

*** 

At the end of the ninth day, Jaz finds Adam lying on the trampoline in his sister’s yard. The rest of the team has gone back to the hotel for the night, and his sisters are putting the girls to sleep. Faith’s husband, a quiet and kind man named Todd had told Jaz Adam was in the back yard when she came into the kitchen. He’d handed her two open beers and said something about checking on his wife and daughters. 

She puts the two beers on the trampoline so she can climb on and they roll toward the center, stopping when they get to Adam. He doesn’t move to pick them up or even look at her. Ever since Sophie’s ex-husband Jim showed up Jaz has felt Adam lost in his own head. The change has been subtle. He is still brother and team leader in front of everyone else. After Ivan failed to find Leah in Florida, Adam had spent two days with the FBI following up on Hannah’s lead. He’d explained to his family how knowing this information was a reason to hope. He cited statistics about missing kids and reminded Sophie she had always thought Leah had run away on her own. 

“This is a good thing,” he kept saying. 

But at night he curls into Jaz and the silence between them feels heavy. It isn’t a somber heaviness borne out of fear but a hungry one driven by guilt. She wants to push him to talk, but this is Top. He has always been the one between them with the right answer. She lets her feelings get ahead of her whereas he can rule them into submission. It’s what makes him a great commanding officer, and Jaz doesn’t trust herself to ask the right questions. Sometimes when he presses kisses to her breast bone she wants to pull back and pick a fight with him. Anything to force him to let her in. The words, talk to me, are bunched in her throat like bitter wine coming back up. Instead, she holds on to him tighter and imagines a little girl with his eyes is out there somewhere, safe and missing her uncle. 

*** 

On the tenth day, Jaz parks the car so she can greet Preach at baggage claim and wrap her arms around him. He hugs her back and for a second she leans into him. 

“You didn’t have to come in,” he says. 

“Yes, I did,” she says. Preach shoulders his backpack and they both pretend she isn’t crying. 

He smiles, “Yeah, you did.” 

As she pulls onto the interstate, the palms of her hands grow sweaty. Preach texts Maggie that he’s arrived safely and whole. They’re outside of Philly before he asks. 

“So what you’d and Adam do in Florida?” 

“You’re like a damn Yenta!” 

Preach laughs so hard it echoes in the car and Jaz has to laugh too. 

“Oh, I love being right,” he drawls. 

“Well, we aren’t technically anything.” Jaz readjusts her grip on the steering wheel. 

Preach eyes her and she points at the road ahead of them as if that means anything, “He’s in the middle of a family crisis. We’re going to talk after.” Preach looks at her. “Can we talk about anything else? Did you ever take your family out to that fancy restaurant or are you still eating baby food?” 

“I was on a modified diet.” 

“Baby food.” 

He tells her about Maggie and the girls – how they liked his gifts she helped him pick out, that his oldest is into bare midriff tops, and that Maggie will press her palms to his chest sometimes just to hear his heart beat. 

Jaz takes her eyes off the road to look at him, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“You were where you needed to be,” he says it as if it were the simplest fact in the world. And something in Jaz’s brain makes the connection. She imagines someone pressing down on a piano key over and over – the steady chime of a string vibrating with quiet insistency. You were where you needed to be. 

Everyone had been so focused on where Leah might be that they hadn’t asked what the teenage girl might need. 

Jaz’s breath stops in her chest and Preach shouts as their car begins to swerve. 

“What the hell, Jaz?” 

Jaz stares at him with wide eyes, “I’ve been her.” 

“Who?” 

“Leah. I’ve been that teenage girl who feels completely alone in the world. In a family where I don’t fit in,” she scans the highway signs and skids across two lanes of traffic. Preach swears, but Jaz ignores him. She hands him her phone. 

“Look in my contacts. The address for their family cabin is in there. Top wanted to make sure I could always find him when we were stateside. In case I needed him.” 

“Jaz, you’re making no sense.” 

She exits the highway and instead of heading north toward Carlisle she turns onto a two-lane highway and west. 

“I need the address, Preach.” 

He hears the panic in her voice so he finds it and they plug it into the car’s GPS. They’re forty-five minutes away and once the route is locked in Jaz lets herself exhale. Preach watches her. 

“What?” 

“Jaz, they checked the cabin. Days ago.” 

“But they didn’t check the woods.” 

“Why do you think she’s there?” 

Jaz swallows. She tells herself she’s keeping her eyes fixed on the road because that’s the safe thing to do. Not because she can’t look at Preach and say this. 

“After Tehran I was terrified of losing you guys,” she licks her lips. “You guys rescuing me – that was the first time in my whole life someone came for me. When I was Leah’s age I’d stay out late just to see if my parents would ground me. I joined the army because I wanted to see them mad. I wanted -,” her voice catches and she can’t say the rest. 

She can’t look at Preach because she doesn’t want to know what his face looks like when he sees her like this – pitiful and alone. She’d promised herself she’d never admit to anyone how deep the hurt went. Elijah knew but they never talked about it. I don’t care what you do but believe me when I say it: we both deserve it. It’s the last thing he’d written in his letter because he knew without her ever having to say it. She doesn’t believe it. But there’s a little girl missing and she needs Preach to back her up on this. She knows Leah is out there waiting for someone to find her, to prove she isn’t as alone as she feels. 

For a long minute there’s just the hum of cars outside and Jaz holds her gaze on the road. Finally, Preach sighs. 

“Want me to call Adam?” 

She shakes her head, “Not yet. Not until we have something concrete.” 

 

*** 

The sun is high in the sky when they pull up the gravel drive to the family cabin; it’s made of worn wood and has an oversized front porch. There are even goddamn rocking chairs on it and flowers in the window boxes. Jaz knows both of those things are Sophie’s touch. As they get out of the car, Jaz listens. There is the sway of pine trees in a rippling wind and somewhere a bird calls out. Preach climbs out of the car and Jaz jumps a bit at the sound of his door shutting. 

“She’s her uncle’s niece,” Preach says. He comes around the car to stand next to her. “Let’s assume she’s got some of Adam’s common sense. She’d have camped out near water. Somewhere protected from the wind and rain.” 

“She’s a thirteen year-old girl,” Jaz says, “not a soldier.” 

“Where do you think she went then?” 

Jaz scans the cabin, meadow, and ridge line of the Blue Ridge mountains. “Somewhere where she can be seen.” 

There’s a slope west of the cabin that is gentler than the rest and Jaz points. It’s hard to make out, but there is a whisp of smoke rising from the tree line less than a click away. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” Preach says. 

*** 

They find her in her tent. 

Her foot sticks out of the flap and for an instant time stops. Preach puts a hand on her shoulder as if to tell her he’ll check, but Jaz runs toward the pale arched foot, bare and swollen from mosquito bites. Leah is inside passed out. Jaz crawls over her body and swears to a God she doesn’t believe in that this little girl better be alright. She’s still warm and stupidly the first thing Jaz does is hug her. Preach swears and she vaguely hears him calling someone. Jaz presses two fingers to Leah’s neck and lets herself exhale when she finds a stead pulse. 

“Leah, I’ve got you, okay?” Jaz holds the little girl, her pixie hair greasy and matted, “I’ve got you.” 

*** 

Jaz stays with her until they get to the hospital. She’s the one to go with Leah in the helicopter when it lands in the field next to the Dalton family cabin. Preach promises to meet her at the hospital with the team and Leah’s family. Jaz mouths thank you because she’s not leaving this little girl’s side until she delivers Leah to Sophie and Adam. 

Leah comes to right before they load her onto the helicopter. She’s groggy and disoriented. The medic says she’s dehydrated and her leg is broken, but otherwise she will be fine. 

“I’m Jaz. I work with your uncle,” she says.

Leah blinks, “Where’s my mom? I need to tell her -,” 

“She’s gonna meet us at the hospital. Everyone is gonna be so happy to see you,” Jaz tears up, “You’re really loved, sweetheart.” 

The words feel strange on her lips but she says them because it’s true. Leah needs to know and Jaz is going to tell her because she wishes someone had done the same for her. 

*** 

At the hospital, Jaz falls back with Hannah, Amir, Preach, and McG. Adam doesn’t even meet her eye as he follows his sister, who shouts Leah’s name as she envelopes her daughter in her arms. 

McG eyes Jaz as the Dalton family disappears into the emergency room and they are left in the waiting room. “You okay?” 

“Of course. Leah’s home, safe. What else could I want?” 

“Right,” he says and Jaz hugs her arms around her stomach. 

They wait for a few hours with the rest of the Dalton nieces in the waiting room. Jaz keeps herself occupied coloring with Faith’s twin girls at one of those plastic tables so small her knees don’t fit beneath it. Eventually, an exhausted Adam finds them and escorts his nieces in to see Leah. He looks toward Jaz, but she ducks her head. She doesn’t know why. 

They wait some more, and Jaz can’t sit still any longer. She paces the waiting room, but Hannah curls up in Amir’s arms and she can’t stay in there either. So Jaz pushes through the hospital doors and into the sunshine. 

It feels off that it’s still the middle of the day. The American flag waves high up on its pole in front of the hospital and lazy begonias spill out of their flower beds. Jaz paces the parking lot and forces herself to breath in and out through her nose. 

It hadn’t been Adam’s fault Leah went missing; it’d been Jaz’s. 

She knows that’s not rational, but she feels it to be true. She shakes out her hands and tries to steady her breathing. As a sniper she is uncommonly good at taking control of the autonomic systems of her body, but today everything rushes at her: she feels stuck in the moment when you tip your chair back far enough and you know you’re about to fall. 

She thinks of how months ago she’d said those words aloud to Xander, her guys, and once uttered they’d become true, or at least truer like a color fully saturated. She tells herself she’s being ridiculous, aloud out there in the hospital parking lot, and hopes the same trick will work this time. This isn’t her fault. 

*** 

When Jaz finally lets herself go back inside, the team is back in the room with Leah. Jaz slips in there and scans the room for Adam. He is the only one missing. Hannah leans over to whisper he’s talking to the FBI agent down the hall. Jaz nods and tells herself she can wait. They can wait. 

Sophie perches on side of the hospital bed and frames her daughter’s face with both hands, “Leah, what were you thinking?”

Leah looks at Jaz and Jaz silently encourages her with a gentle smile. 

“I don’t want to be you,” Leah shakes. 

Sophie is crying too, “I know that.” 

“You’re always telling me the world isn’t fair. Especially to girls. And if I want to be happy I have to learn to fit in. But I can’t. I’m not like you. I wanted to show you I can survive on my own, but then the bear came and -,” 

“There was a bear?!” Sophie looks dazed as she tries to absorb the information. 

There had been – Leah told Jaz as much during the helicopter ride – how she’d used the money to buy camping equipment and take an Uber all the way to the cabin. She thought she’d only be there a few days, but then a bear stumbled upon her campsite one night. She’d climbed a tree to hide while it ransacked her food supply, and once it was gone she’d fallen trying to climb down. With a broken leg and no feed, Leah had dragged herself over to her tent, rationing her water, and trying to keep the fire going with whatever kindling she could find in the hopes someone would find her eventually. 

“You’re daughter is pretty badass,” Jaz says and Sophie smiles through her tears. 

“Stop.” Faith pushes off the wall where she’d been leaning. “Don’t turn what happened into a joke. This isn’t one of your missions you brag about over drinks afterwards.” She rounds on Jaz, “This is my niece.” 

“Faith,” Sophie gently admonishes. 

“I know this is personal for you,” Jaz starts. She stops because the words come out wrong. These women aren’t like her. For them, everything gets to be personal. But that’s not what she is trying to say. She wants to say this is personal for her too – they are Adam’s family and he is her’s, but she can’t say that because they haven’t talked yet. There are so many words left unsaid between them, and after this she doesn’t know if they’ll even matter. 

“This is your fault,” Faith steps into Jaz’s space, “you took him away from her, from us, when we needed him. If it wasn’t for you Leah would have never had the idea to run away in the first place.” 

“I didn’t run away,” Leah says. 

Sophie touches her sister’s elbow, “You know that isn’t fair, Faith.” 

But the other sister yanks her arm away and rounds on Sophie, “You say it all the time. They get all of him. He’ll never get to live his own goddamn life, never come back here and have a family, never be here because he has to fix every goddamn broken person in the army. She’s just the latest.” 

Jaz wishes for her side piece – not for the violence it represents, but for the security of knowing she can protect herself. Faith rounds on her and Jaz freezes. She is defenseless because what can she say? She has no words to lean on, no confession of feelings, or even the promise of ones to come. All she has are her own feelings and hopes. 

She stands there alone as ever. 

Faith is crying when she looks at Jaz one last time, “He was my brother first.” 

*** 

She’s throwing clothes into her go bag when the hotel door clicks open. Hannah enters just as Jaz’s hand finds that romper, the one she wore to the salsa club with Adam just last week, wrinkled and stuffed into a ball. She doesn’t look at Hannah as she tosses the romper into the trash. The other woman surveys Jaz’s red face puffy from crying and whap of clothes as she shoves them into her bag, and then she does something that stops Jaz in her tracks. 

She retrieves her own bag and starts packing too. 

Jaz stops. “What are you doing?” 

Hannah raises her chin, “Going with you.” 

Jaz scoffs, “I don’t need your help.” 

“Yes, you damn well do.” 

“How about this: I don’t want your help.” 

“Too bad.” Hannah folds her clothes neatly and methodically into her suitcase. Jaz stands there gaping like an idiot. She even forgets to cry. 

“Is this my fault?” she whispers. 

Hannah straightens. “Of course it’s not your fucking fault. You found her. You saved her life.” 

“But Faith -,” 

“Faith was upset,” Hannah says, “and an incredible bitch to you.” 

Jaz hugs her arms to her stomach, “I don’t have anywhere to go.” 

“Florida?” 

“That was our place.” 

“And you don’t want to wait to talk to Adam?” 

Jaz shakes her head and while she knows she is being unreasonable, the panic in her chest is too tight. She is trying to hold it in, but if she doesn’t run – get space—she’s going to unravel. 

Hannah doesn’t try to hug Jaz in the moment and for that Jaz is grateful. Instead Hannah hoists her bag onto her shoulder and looks at Jaz, “If the goal is not here then we’ll figure it out the rest after we’re gone.” 

*** 

Adam sprints off the elevator. 

She didn’t go dark again. She couldn’t have. Hadn’t they gotten past that? 

He thinks of running through that parking deck in Tehran, knowing she was slipping through his fingers with each passing second, and that old panic flares up. He comes around the corner to the hallway to his own hotel room. There sitting in the hall outside the door to his hotel room are Amir, McG, and Preach. McG is the first to stand up. He moves between Adam and the door. 

“Just take a deep breath, Top.” 

“Where is she?” He eyes the door. Maybe she is in there? He just needs to get to her. If he can, he can fix this. 

McG shakes his head, “She’s not in there.”

“Then where the hell is she?” 

The three of them share a look, and Adam feels the helplessness he felt in Tehran clasp like talons at his throat. 

“She’s gone,” McG finally answers. Adam swings his fist, and McG blocks it easily. 

He holds onto the wall to catch his breath. “Where?” 

“Hannah’s with her. She’s not alone.” Amir says. 

“Where?” 

Preach jerks his head and McG moves to his side. Amir too. It’s them looking at him and Adam repeats his question, “Where is she?” 

“We’re not going to tell you, Adam.” Preach says. 

“Consider it an order.” 

“You know that’s not how this works,” McG says. 

“She’ll be okay. You’ll be okay,” Preach’s tone even and quiet. “Right now she needs space and you’re gonna give it to her.” 

“I’m in love with her.” 

“And you should’ve told her right away.” Preach counters. 

Amir blinks, “Wait you didn’t tell her?” 

“It was…complicated.” 

McG scrubs his hands over his face, “This is why I do one-night stands,” he mutters. 

Adam sinks down to the carpet. His friends lower themselves to the floor. He stares at the bland repeating pattern on the carpet and lets his head thud against the wall. He closes his eyes, “I needed time. A plan. I couldn’t tell her how I feel without a way to make it work. It wouldn’t be fair to her.” 

“Dude, this is real life. Not the military,” McG says, “you figure that shit out together.” 

Adam doesn’t speak because there isn’t anything to say. 

*** 

Jaz wakes up somewhere south of Philly. They’re on a generic stretch of highway and the sun has set. She’d fallen asleep somewhere just outside of Carlisle. She rolls her shoulders to work out the kinks from sleeping sitting up. Hannah turns down the radio. 

“Where are we going?” 

“I got to thinking after you fell asleep,” Hannah says, “about what to say or advice to offer, and I realized I don’t have any insight of value. So the best thing I could do was bring you to someone who does.” 

“Where are we going, Hannah?” 

Hannah looks at her, “Patricia. We’re going to see Patricia.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make my world go round. You can find me at kyrieanne on Tumblr and kyrieanneflails on Twitter.


	10. Chapter 10

Adam finds the note when they’re checking out.

 

He’s doing a sweep of the room Jaz shared with Hannah, and he has no idea what he’s looking for exactly. Something – anything – to ease the desperate feeling he has to _act_. He remembers how he told Jaz sometimes waiting is the smart move and right now that feels like such bullshit.

 

He stands there in the doorway of her hotel room, and he smiles to himself because if she was here she’d give him hell for admitting as much. Then he sees the tipped over, too-small trash can and his smile fades. He knows what it is before he picks it up – it’s that damn romper she wore to the salsa club.

 

It feels an age ago that they were those two people, dressing up, going out, and pressing into darkened corners. He can hear her voice from that night, heady when he touched her, _Take me home._ Then his phone rang and they’d returned to a different kind of home:  the one that lives in the real world. It was more real than deployment, which is its own form of escape, because when something truly matters you don’t run away. You stay.

 

Adam sinks down on the bed, holding the crumpled silk in his hands, and he tries not to imagine the worst. He tries to keep his mind on the facts:  Faith hadn’t just yelled at Jaz she’d unwittingly turned all of Jaz’s insecurities inside out and exposed them.

 

_“He has to fix every goddamn broken person in the army. She’s just the latest.”_

Sophie told him what had been said. Leah added, “I wanted to tell her people love her. That’s what she told me when she found me and it helped with the fear. She looked really scared.”

 

Faith had tried to apologize. She’d following him out of the hospital as he took the stairs two at a time. In the parking lot, she’d called out his name.

 

“Adam, I was angry. I shouldn’t have -.”

 

“You goddamn knew better, Fee.” He barked and he saw her flinch at the sharpness of his voice. His old nickname for her had slipped out along with the temper he usually can check.

 

Faith wrung her hands, “She won’t blame you.”

 

This time his voice had been under control, but he didn’t soften the truth, “No, she’ll blame herself.”

 

With that he’d left Faith in the parking lot. He’d gotten to the hotel where he’d found her gone. She’d shut him out again, disappeared, as if the past months hadn’t happened.

 

Now, Adam holds the romper in his hands and breathes through his nose. It’s an old technique learned in high school sports to slow his breathing, quiet his mind, and even out the _thump, thump, thump_ of his heart. He tries to tell himself that her leaving, throwing away the remnant of that night together, is reactionary more than a total and complete rejection of _them_.

 

He tries, but it doesn’t work.

 

When it comes to Jaz, Adam isn’t her commanding officer. He hasn’t been since he pounded on her door in the rain down in the friendliest RV park in Tallahassee. He can’t compartmentalize his feelings for her; there is no way to take _them_ off the table and analyze like the tactician he’s supposed to be.

 

Instead, all he has is a crumpled romper and a fear that isn’t about life or death. It’s something different and it makes him mad that he can’t name it. He doesn’t understand it. It isn’t like the rage that he kept tethered in the field. This isn’t even about protecting his team or his family.  

 

Adam is angry and hurt and so many other emotions he’d kept neatly tucked away until her. He remembers her question, _when did the wanting begin?_ How his answer had been this:  in the contradiction of her. He dared to let himself want that contradiction, and it’d come to this:  something as easily ruined as a scrap of silk.

 

But even when she’s gone, Jaz has to get the last word.

 

He shifts on the bed and under him is the crinkle of paper. He’s half-sitting on an envelope and when he picks it up his heart pounds in his ears at the sight of her name. He recognizes Elijah’s chicken scrawl. The envelope is creased and well-worn as if it’d been opened and reopened dozens of times. He doesn’t think twice unfolding the note even though it’s addressed to her. She left it on the edge of her bed. He knows she did.

 

_Jaz,_

_God, I hate that you’re reading this. I so wasn’t ready to die. I mean, we all are prepared for it or we wouldn’t do what we do. But I didn’t want to go. I had a lot of living I wanted to do. That’s why I got this monstrosity (I know that’s what you’re calling it) – to make a home and take it with me wherever I go. You and I never really had that, but we both deserve it._

_God, this is so maudlin. I don’t entirely know why I’m writing this. It’s just something I feel the need to do. I am going to laugh at myself when I find this years from now when we’ve all made it back from the deployments safe and sound. Maybe I’ll let you in on the joke. We’ll see._

_But if you’re reading this and we’re not joking about it…then I clearly went first in a heroic blaze of glory so I need to ask a favor. Live a little extra for me. Take a few more risks. Let a few more people love you. Get your stuff out of that storage unit and buy a damn vase. I don’t care what you do but believe me when I say it:  we both deserve it._

_Elijah_

 

And then scrawled below Elijah’s words are her own:  _I’m trying._

 

***

 

_He was my brother first_.

 

Adam knows that’s what Faith had said to Jaz, and he knows it’s both not fair and true at the same time. He chose to go to Florida when his family had been so excited to see him home. His choice of career takes him away from some of the most important people in his life and while Adam feels the absence of watching his nieces grow up through photos he knows he’s not the only one who feels it. They do too. Sophie and Faith and their daughters miss him.

 

Jaz’s confession that night in his hotel room surfaces in those first few days alone at the family cabin: “ _I hate coming back after deployments_. _I don’t have anyone. Or anywhere.”_

That isn’t Adam’s story. His own is tragic enough, but he has his sisters. He has a place – a literal place – to come back to, and he has people who miss him. He thinks of the scar on Jaz’s knee and her response when he found it:  _please don’t pity me_. To argue with that fear does her a disservice. Adam doesn’t know what it’s like to be let down by everyone. He knows what it’s like to have too grow up too soon, but his sisters – then his nieces -- have always been his anchor.

 

They are so similar, but they are not the same.

 

He thinks of Elijah and the RV and the note Jaz left behind:  _I’m trying._

She’s trying to believe Elijah’s words, that she deserves a home. It’s one thing to want one, but to believe you deserve it is work when every fact about your life tells you the opposite.

 

On his best days, Adam tells himself her going dark isn’t about _them_ , but her working out herself to make _them_ possible. That works about half of the time, and on mornings when he wakes up angry because he’s hard and the air smells like lemon and lavender for no reason other than that’s his memory of her, on those days he lets himself miss her and resent her in the same breath.

 

But there is a reason Adam Dalton has the nickname Top. It isn’t because he’s smarter or stronger than other people; his advantage is that his shit childhood gave him a choice early on to either be honest or ignorant. He chose honest long before he knew what truth costs a person. In these six weeks choosing honest means making space for both his frustration and his privilege. It means letting go of the woman he loves because he trusts her to come back. It means enjoying the good:  mornings with Patton in the woods around his family’s cabin, the shriek of his nieces when they see him, and the possibility of Jaz without the promise of it.

 

He chooses honest and that allows him to be both angry and grateful at the same time. If she is trying, as both her commanding officer and the man who loves her, he can at least do the same.

 

So for six weeks that’s his mission.

 

***

 

He starts with his nieces because that feels the like the most important thing to do. He doesn’t do it because of Jaz, but he does think of her in the field:  going into that mall in Nigeria for that little girl and gathering up Verina and Mina in her arms after they watch men killed in front of them. It’s an easy choice to start with his nieces, and it’s made easier knowing Jaz would smile seeing him do so.

 

The first night after Leah’s released Adam spends at Sophie’s just being with his nieces. Leah is especially needy in the way thirteen year-old girls are.

 

“Whatever you want, Uncle Adam,” she feigns indifference when he asks if she’d like him to tell them stories like he normally does on summer nights at the family cabin.

 

So, he carries her out to the back yard and Sophie herds the rest of his nieces out to join them – Faith is inside keeping her distance – and he lies down in the too long grass next to Leah. It pricks the back of his neck. Faith’s twin girls tuck themselves along his other side. They mirror one another the way twins always seem to do without thought, and Leah’s sisters fan out around her as if they stray too far she’ll disappear again.

 

Tonight, he doesn’t tell them the stories about vain queens or ancient heroes. They’ve heard edited versions of those tales over the years. Instead, Adam tells them about Lily, the aunt they’ll never meet, and how her favorite stars had been the constellation Virgo.

 

“She liked it because it was her in the sky,” he says, “a girl just like each of you.”

 

Leah turns her head toward him, “How do you find her?”

 

He knows she’s talking about the stars, but something tightens in his chest. _I can’t_ is the answer he doesn’t voice. Instead, he clears his throat, “Can you find the Big Dipper?”

 

It takes Leah too long to find it; one of her sisters does it for her. There’s beat of sisterly irritation and Adam laughs for the first time since Jaz left.

 

“So brightest star in the Virgo constellation is called Spica,” he says knowing they won’t remember this tomorrow, “And you can find it by following the curve of the Big Dipper. You just follow the arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spica.”

 

“And straight on to morning,” Sophie whispers. She’s wandered out to the lawn and sinks down on the other side of Faith’s girls asleep on Adam’s ribs. He finds her eye because years ago Lily had done this, curled up next to Adam, and made him read her _Peter Pan_. Faith and Sophie would hover at the foot of his bed and Adam remembers thinking they were like the lost boys, a found family even within their own actual one. The ache of Lily missing is familiar, but Adam glances back toward the house and the kitchen light that glows over Sophie’s gardenia bushes. This new ache – the gulf between him and Faith – is new.

 

Leah elbows Adam, “Tell us another!” and he looks away from the house. He chooses to tell them about a brother whose sister was stolen so the brother discovers a magic that allows him to become invisible.

 

“He used that magic to hunt down the monsters who stole his sister even though he knew it would not bring her back. His name was Amir.”

 

He tells them all the stories:  of the wise man named Ezekiel who the gods placed in the stars so no one would forget his teachings, of the boy named Joseph who laughed like a monkey and made women feel beautiful, and of the warrior.

 

“She was called Sagittarius,” he whispers. Most of his nieces are asleep by now and the chill of the night sneaks up Adam’s legs. But Leah is still wide awake and so is Sophie. So, he keeps going. He tells them about Jaz without saying her name. He points out her constellation, and he explains that the tip of her arrow is pointed at the Antares star, which is the heart of the scorpion. “She always has her bow at the ready to protect whoever needs protecting.”

 

He thinks of the set of her face when they decided to send her in to kill Jarrif.

 

_“Let’s make sure there are no next guys.”_

God, he loves her.

 

He loves her bravery and how it is the plumb line for everything she does. Leah told him how Jaz found her, stroked back her matted hair, and promised her she was loved so very much. Even if there is nothing future for _them_ , he wants to wrap his arms around her and say _thank you_.

 

Leah yawns and Adam knows the signs of oncoming sleep, “I like her,” Leah says, “we need more of her.”

 

***

 

On the last night before his guys go home, he gets drunk on the porch of his cabin with Amir, McG, and Preach.

 

The moon is full and it gleams silvery and ghostly down on the shadows of the mountains. Patton lies at his feet and Adam sips a scotch that he’d been saving for some unknown future date. Tonight, feels the right kind of fuzzy to open the bottle. They aren’t celebrating, but they aren’t mourning either.

 

McG tips back the last of the scotch in his glass, “Top, your brain is loud as fuck. Get it out there, whatever it is you’re keeping to yourself.”

 

Adam has had enough to drink that he pours McG another and refills his own glass too. They’re the only two drinking since Amir doesn’t and Preach’s doctor ordered diet certainly doesn’t include alcohol.

 

“I fucked up, didn’t I?” He says it looking into the amber swirl of the scotch. He can practically feel them looking past him to one another.

 

Of course, it’s Preach who answers.  

 

“I don’t think this is about mistakes.”

 

Adam huffs, “I want to hug her and shake her at the same time.”

 

McG whistles, “I hate to break the news to you but you’re in deep when you feel like that. That hate/love is a sure sign you’re a goner. Well, except for Al-Raisani and Hannah. They’re just naeustiangly sweet.”

 

“There’s a girl out there somewhere for you, McG,” Amir says, “no need to lash out.”

 

Adam sets his glass on the arm of his chair and twists it so the condensation leaves looping circles on the wood. He shifts his jaw, “What am I supposed to do?”  

 

“That’s for you to figure out. Not us.”

 

“Shit, Preach that’s not helpful.” Adam pushes up from his chair and stalks off the porch. Patton follows after him, whining, and he feels guilty for how he’s neglected the poor dog all summer. He adds it to the list of things he’s failed to do as he ought.  

 

He only makes it a few yards before he comes charging back up the porch, “I get thinking I neeed a complete plan before telling her I love her wasn’t smart.”

 

“No shit, Sherlock.”

 

It comes from Amir and not McG.

 

There’s a pause and Adam has to hold onto the railing of the porch when all of them burst out laughing, including Amir. It might be the alcohol or the reality that somehow his life has become _drama_. Whatever it is, Adam laughs.

 

It’s a deep laugh that contracts the muscles in his stomach. He sinks down onto the porch steps. He wipes tears from the corners of his eyes and cranes his neck up to take in the stars. Even though the distance between Carlisle and here is relatively short the sky looks different depending on where you stand. He considers the distance between the RV park in Tallahassee and this place where all his baggage and demons will never be forgotten.

 

Adam scrubs both hands over his face,

 

“Fuck,” he says to no one in particular. “We really messed this up, didn’t we?”

 

***

 

In the morning, Adam drops Preach and McG off at the airport. Amir leaves later morning in a rental car to make the drive back to D.C.

 

“I’ve got some thinking to do,” the other man says, “long drives are good for that.”

 

Adam wants to ask what Amir isn’t saying, but he doubts he’s much good as a friend right now. At least once an hour he has to stop himself from calling in favors to find her, to follow her, and to face her.

 

And still he finds himself turning his head when McG says something he knows would make Jaz smile. He’s looking for her; years of training have honed his muscle memory in the field and now the same is true when it comes to her. He will always be turning expecting she’s right by his side. The whip of emotions - from anger to laughter to fear to love – leave Adam shaky so he doesn’t press Amir. He trusts his team will hold themselves together while he figures himself out.

 

“Top,” Amir leans on the driver’s door of his rental car, “what are you gonna do?”

 

“Go home.”

 

 

***

 

After his guys leave, Adam waits. He waits to hear from Jaz and to figure out how the hell he feels. He knows he’s in love with her, but that’s not his only emotion. Some nights he dreams and they have nothing to do with her; he’s searching for Lily and then Leah and then neither of them, but for something that lies at the end of an endless hallway.

 

He wakes up alone in his bed and he reaches for her. That’s when the anger and the hurt and the missing flood him and on those nights he knows sleep is never going to happen. So he stumbles out to the porch in his boxer briefs, and he sits there with Patton as the sun rises over the field around his cabin, the light muted from fog and the lavender heavy with dew. He sits there missing her and he shivers in the grey pre-dawn world.

 

_This_ – _this waiting_ – Adam knows isn’t good for him. He can’t keep the dreams at bay or the wanting her to thread her arms around him and press her cold nose to his sternum. He doesn’t fight it, but he decides it’s best not to dwell too much on it either. He needs an objective, he decides.

 

It’s late summer so his nieces are still out of school, and Adam arranges to meet Sophie half-way on Fridays to take the six of them off his sisters’ hands. It’s complete chaos. Leah is not helpful because she can’t play the role of oldest cousin with her leg in a cast, but Adam approaches it like he planning on op.

 

He spends the first part of the week in the kitchen; Amir suggests meals and snacks and Adam stocks the pantry. He plans out an itinerary by the hour:  firefly catching, star gazing, nap times, hiking excursions, and life skills lessons. He lines them up in order of age:  from four to thirteen years-old, on the front porch, their feet dangling off the edge, and teaches them how to tie a sheet bend, trucker’s hitch, and a bowline. He spends his evenings on the Girl Scouts website learning how they recommend teaching life skills that promote self-esteem. There’s a magazine and he quickly pays for the digital subscription.

 

Then one night one of Faith’s twin girls asks him, “Uncle Adam, where’s your wife?”

 

She tucks her chin over the arm of the chair he sits in and her blue eyes are so wide and clear. She looks just like Faith with the set of her eyes, but she is so direct and unassuming that Adam feels pinned down by just her gaze.

 

“I don’t have a wife,” he says and pulls her onto his lap.

 

“Is that because you have to fight the bad guys?”

 

He stops because the first answer on his lips is a lie:  his job won’t let him have a wife. It is half-true, but also not. So instead, Adam gathers up his four year-old niece in his lap, and when her sister demands space too he makes it. Leah complains her sister isn’t toasting marshmallows correctly in the fireplace and Adam lets them squabble until Leah says something unkind. Then he puts a stop to it, and they eat gooey s’mores and he carries both of his four year-old nieces to bed with sticky moustaches made of chocolate and graham cracker.

 

***

 

The weekends with his nieces help Adam avoid not only his nightmares and wanting Jaz, but also Faith. Sophie plays her part as the peace-maker for exactly a month, and then she bristles like a cat whose fur is rubbed in the wrong direction.

 

“Will you fucking get over yourself?” she hisses at Adam one Monday morning when she meets him at the rest stop half-way between Carlisle and the family cabin to pick up the girls.

 

They are piled into her SUV and she’s in a suit because while Adam is on leave, the world doesn’t stop. Her daughter might have gone missing and come back, but she still has a mortgage and summer camps to pay for so work must go on.

 

“She’s the one -,”

 

“We’re too old for pointing fingers, Adam.”

 

“She shouldn’t have said those things to Jaz. It wasn’t fair.”

 

“Neither is you punishing her for the past month.”

 

“She’s the one not talking to me.”

 

“Adam, you do know who you are, right? You call the shots in every room you walk into. This family especially, and I’ll admit you’ve earned it,” Sophie sighs, “But you’re punishing Faith because you can’t make a damn decision when it comes to your life.”

 

***

 

He calls Xander, who won’t spills Jaz’s secrets even though Adam doesn’t ask directly. He definitely hints at it, hoping the other man might give him an easy answer. Instead, he stays solely on the topic of Adam.

 

“Are they wrong?” Xander asks.

 

“Faith and Sophie?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

Adam exhales through his nose, “I’m not their keeper. That’s my team and having a plan for me and Jaz was important because it affects my team. They’re who I’m responsible for. Faith and Sophie have their own lives. Their own families.”

 

“Yet, even your own father and former brother-in-law think differently.”

 

“They’re drunks.”

 

“Gives them a lot of time to sit with their feelings.”

 

“That’s not funny, Xander.” Adam’s voice is rawer than he intends it to be.

 

“Addiction never is, but it’s also not disqualifying.”

 

“I don’t want to talk about them. They don’t deserve it.”

 

Xander pauses and Adam knows those pauses. They open up terrible gaping holes in one’s psyche.

 

“Then what’s haunting you, Adam?”

 

***

 

Five weeks after Jaz leaves it’s Faith who calls first.

 

“They’re gone,” She’s hyperventilating and Adam is already on his feet, searching blindly for his keys. “The girls. I left them with Daddy and Jim to get ice cream. I drove them to the parlor and they promised me they wouldn’t go anywhere. I just wanted to get my nails done. But when I got back to pick up the girls they’re all gone. The restaurant owner says they left a half hour ago.”

 

Adam is in his rental car, the door still half-open, as he peels down the gravel drive. The hour between him and Carlisle has never seemed so long.

 

“Are you fucking crazy, Faith? Sophie is going to kill you.”

 

“I don’t need a lecture about how I suck, okay?” Faith cries. “Our girls are missing.”

 

Adam doesn’t remind Faith that Sophie left her in charge of her four girls for the first time since Leah had gone missing; it’d been for a work trip to D.C. and he doesn’t tell Faith how Sophie called him crying from the road. She unloaded her fears and frustrations about being a single mom, about marrying an alcoholic, and how much she misses Lily. It’d been the kind of conversation that made Adam desperate for Jaz to hold his face in her hands and press her forehead to his own.

 

That hour to Carlisle is one of the longest of Adam’s life. It isn’t just the ghost of Leah’s disappearance or the fact that they’ve already lost a sister and a mother. It’s the overwhelming fact that so much of what matters most to Adam is outside of his control.

 

And that scares the fuck out of him.

 

As the terrible, wrenching truth settles over him, Adam picks up his phone. It makes no sense, but the person he calls is Patricia.

 

Her voice is warm and happy, “Adam.”

 

“Hi,” he stutters.

 

Despite the distance he can practically hear her roll her shoulders, “Talk to me, Dalton.”

 

“We’re…I’m gonna need to make a change,” he scrubs a hand over his face, “I don’t know what that looks like. I wanted to have a plan.”

 

“I know.”

 

“You do?”

 

“I see more than you think I do,” she chides.

 

Adam pulls down that perfect street that Sophie lives on, and his heart leaps when he sees his nieces in the front yard doing cart wheels. Faith is there with Jim and their father. Adam pulls up to the curb and takes Patricia off speaker phone.

 

“I’m trying,” he says, borrowing Jaz’s words, “to be more than just the job. To figure out my happy.”  

 

“Adam,” Patricia’s voice catches, “I’m proud.”

 

***

 

“Uncle Adam!” Leah shouts, “look at what Daddy and Granddaddy bought me!”

 

She holds up a compound bow, shiny and new. Adam schools his face so his smile says nothing to Leah but happiness, but Jim and his own father – a man he hasn’t seen hasn’t in almost two decades – lean against a pick-up truck, their chins tucked, as Adam Dalton walks across the street.

 

He’s confronted bigger men than these two so slowing his stroll across the street and up into the yard is easy. Inhaling to control his temper is practiced form. His hands loose in his pockets is standard operating procedure when you want to be inconspicuous. Adam may be teaching his nieces survival skills – knots and how to read the sky – but he has no interest in introducing them to the real things that you have to learn to survive:  the people you love disappointing you, the reality that you can’t fix them, and the way that pain echoes no matter what.

 

“Jim, Dad,” he says. Faith hovers between them, wringing her hands. Adam scratches an ear, “Where’d you go with our girls?”

 

“Adam, you look good son.”

 

Adam looks at Jim, “I asked you a question.”

 

Jim pushes off the truck, “Shit, they’re my daughters.”

 

Adam places himself between these men and his sister.

 

“And mine,” Faith hisses. “You promised me you wouldn’t leave there. You’d promised me you just wanted to see them.”

 

“We haven’t had anything to drink!” Jim shouts it loud enough that his own girls stop their game in the front yard.  

 

“Listen, you all are just overreacting,” their father comes toward them, “Little Leah talked non-stop about that woman you have, Adam, the one who shoots. Jim wanted to get her a bow. A present since she’s been through so much. I’ll admit I think it’s weird. She doesn’t even look like a girl now. Hell, at least when Lily was that age she wanted lipstick and dresses. That at least was normal.”

 

Adam punches his father there in his sister’s driveway. He hears the gasp of his nieces and all he sees is the pooling red blood of his father’s split lip. Jim comes at him, and Adam moves with practiced ease. He puts his former brother-in-law in a headlock in front of his daughters. He gives up trying to protect them from knowing who their father truly is, and in that moment, he decides that honesty – while hard – is the best survival skill he can teach his nieces.

 

***

 

Faith and Adam deal with the aftermath of the fight in their sister’s driveway. They corral the girls inside and Todd, Faith’s husband, arrives with pizza over for dinner. Sophie comes home from D.C. dazed and exhausted to find a teary Faith. Sophie presses two fingers to her temple and tells Faith it’ll be okay. Go home. Hug your daughters. She’s going to go curl into bed with her own.

 

It’s Todd, the quiet man who loves Faith, that says the thing neither his father or Jim will ever say. Todd, the insurance salesman who wears socks with his sandals and has no interest in a world outside Carlisle.

 

“I’ve got your back,” he says to Adam at the end of Sophie’s driveway. “I can’t replace you. Had to make peace with that after Faith spent pretty much our entire second date telling me about her hero big brother.”

 

“I’m just -,”

 

“You’re a fucking hero, Adam,” Todd huffs, “and over the years I’ve figured out that isn’t a title; it’s a fact. I had to realize I was never gonna be you, and I didn’t need to be. That’s the difference between me and them. Your dad and Jim. Next to you they feel small.”

 

“I don’t care,” he says with an honesty that feels like honey on his tongue. It’s sweet and strange at the same time, “I really don’t care. They need to stay away from my nieces until they’re sober.”

 

“I broke some serious laws trying to get here after she called me. You just happened to be closer,” Todd says, “but that’s why I’m saying it when I haven’t before. I’ve got your back. Faith and Sophie. You and I’ve got their backs. Together.”

 

***

 

The next weekend instead of bringing his nieces up to the family cabin, Sophie declares a Dalton family meeting, and shows up with an annoyed Faith in tow.

 

“For the record,” Faith mutters as she shoulders her weekend bag, “I was brought here under duress.”

 

“I might have told her we were going to a spa this weekend.” Sophie shrugs and Patton whines. Adam is smart enough to just go with it.

 

***

 

“Do you think Lily died happy?” Faith asks the question across the bonfire Adam built them over dinner. She’s forsaken the graham crackers and marshmallows and is just eating squares of chocolate.

 

Sophie stares into the fire. The flames bounce off the amber scotch in her glass. “We know Mom didn’t.”

 

“Jesus,” Adam shakes his head, “how dark are we gonna get?”

 

Faith pulls a knee up and perches her chin there, “I’m not going for dark; I just want honest. I think growing up with daddy when he’d get sloppy all I wanted was him to be honest about it. Not cry and pretend it wasn’t going to happen again.”

 

Adam tucks his chin and Sophie makes an _aatch_ sound in her throat, “Stop that right now, Adam Bartholomew. I see you blaming yourself.”

Faith snickers, “Does Jaz know your middle name?”

 

“No and she won’t for a very long time. If she’ll have me that is.” Adam says.

 

A silence settles over them and for a long minute there is only the crackle of the fire.

 

Sophie clears her throat, “You should probably know I saw her when I was in DC.”

 

“What?”

 

“She’s been in DC this whole time. Staying with Hannah. I had work trip down there so I reached out.”

 

Adam’s breath stills. “And?”

 

“There was a mix up,” Sophie says, “she thought you’ve been getting her messages this entire time and were ignoring them because you were mad at her. So, she was giving you space.”

 

“What messages?”

 

Sophie smiles, “You should ask her about those.”

 

Adam thinks of the rolling anger he feels sometimes and the panic he wakes up with in the middle of the night, “I…I don’t know if I’m ready.”

 

Faith rolls her shoulders, “You know, I’ve been really mad at you for leaving us all those years ago. I thought I was over it. But you walked away. You left us with grandma. So, it’s really hard to see you have the same happen to you right now and not say get over it.”

 

“You were better off.” He says.

 

“Don’t you think maybe she thinks the same thing?” Faith challenges.

 

Sophie scoffs, “You both need to get over yourselves.”

 

Ire rises up in Adam’s chest, “Where the hell do you get off?”

 

Sophie and Faith shared a look and he feels pinned between them. He knows he’s not being fair. He’s being a brat. He thinks of Jaz’s single note to him, at least the one he got, over these past weeks:  _I’m trying._

 

Sophie points at Adam. “Where is home? Is it Carlilsle?”

 

He hesitates and she raises her hands up over her hand and whoops.

 

“It’s not. I was so right.” Sophie says and looks at her sister, “and you need to accept that rather than call it leaving. But YOU -,” she presses a finger into Adam’s chest, “aren’t perfect and that’s why you need us. To remind you.”

 

“I don’t think I’m perfect.”

 

It’s Faith’s turn to snort, “You literally ordered our father and Jim off our properties. You swooped into town with your entire Omega team to find Leah. You decided to teach our daughter’s how to start a camp fire without matches.”

 

“That’s an important life skill to have.”

 

His sisters literally cackle.

 

“My girls tried to start a fire in the laundry room this weekend,” Sophie wheezes.

 

“And mine asked for pocket knives for their birthday, Adam. They’re four years-old.”

 

At his feet, even, Patton rolls his eyes.

 

Adam stares at his hands. He feels the blood rush to his face, “I’m trying,” he says.

 

And because they are his sisters he doesn’t need to fill in the rest.

 

Sophie scoots her chair close enough to lie her head on his shoulder, “And we love you for it.”

 

Faith meets his eye before she does the same, and there is the slightest exchange between them. It doesn’t erase the unfair words she levied on Jaz, but it’s a start.

 

“I haven’t helped,” Faith says, “I’ve wanted you to come home without thinking that maybe here isn’t home for you. That you and I aren’t the same.”

 

Sophie yawns, “You both are damn romantics. I’m the only one with any sense in her head.”

 

“You are my family,” Adam picks his words carefully, “but if I’m honest coming back isn’t home. It’s you and the girls. I’m sorry I’m not the brother who just wants to come back. To do the 2.5 kids and a perfect home thing.”

 

“Here’s the thing,” Sophie says. “Parenting makes you really good at loving someone for who they are and not who you want them to be. The same applies to you. Always.”

 

“We want you to be happy, Adam,” Faith says, “that’s the most important.”

 

Happy is such a common and mundane word, but finally he decides it’s important enough to take the risk of not knowing – of not having a plan, of no guarantee they will work out, of not having full control of his own emotions. Happiness – even just the chance of it - feels like a pinprick, sharp and sudden.

 

So Adam finally returns home, to the friendliest RV park in Tallahassee. Elijah said it best - they deserve to try for it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 11 will be posted later today!
> 
> Special thanks to the Fab5 for reading along the way. 
> 
> You can find me at kyrieanne on Tumblr and kyrieanneflails on Twitter.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feelings take work . 
> 
> The postcards are for Lilly.

Hannah has an air mattress in the middle of her living room.

 

When Jaz asks why Hannah just says, “The job.”

 

They get in late and Jaz doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She’s thankful Hannah seems to know this without her having to say it. The other woman puts new sheets on the air mattress, lays out fresh towels, and shows Jaz around the kitchen.

 

“We’ll deal with reality tomorrow,” she says and then Jaz is alone.

 

She takes a shower in Hannah’s bathroom and smells all of the bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and bath scrubs. It’s like a Sephora store and Jaz glances at her own toiletries kit with it’s simple apple shampoo, the salve she puts on her skin, and a single lipstick and mascara tucked away for when she wants a little something extra. There are plenty of women in the military whose routine is simpler than her own, and Jaz has a whole case of makeup packed away for various ops, but when it’s just her in the mirror she isn’t like Hannah, soft and strength at the same time.

 

But that thought feels too much like reality and the other woman is right. It will wait for tomorrow.

 

So Jaz climbs onto the air mattress and tries to fall asleep. Hannah left her with an extra blanket and pillow, but it’s not enough. Jaz pulls the back cushions off the couch and arranges them in a line along her spine. It isn’t Adam, but if she closes her eyes and remembers the feel of his beard along her neck as he tucks himself around her it’s enough to trick herself asleep.

 

*** 

 

 

_Adam,_

_I really don’t know how to begin this so I’ll go with what has always worked between us:  blunt honesty. I ran away. Maybe another day I’ll be able to put into words what the panic felt after I left the hospital. Everything was too much. Or I was a coward. Maybe both?_

_I’m in D.C. staying with Hannah. Amir said you were going home so I’m sending these to the RV. Texting or calling would make more sense, but I want to give you the chance to respond on your own terms. I know I screwed up. I know I’m a mess and that isn’t fair to you. My issues aren’t yours to fix. I’m trying. For Elijah and for you._

_Jaz_

 

***

 

Amir comes over to Hannah’s the morning after he returns from Carlisle. Jaz answers the door with, “Didn’t she tell you she had work today?”

 

“I’m not here for her.” He steps past her into the apartment, both arms full of groceries.

 

Jaz expects him to mention the giant air mattress in the middle of the living room, but he just steps around it and heads for the kitchen.

 

“I thought we could pick up on the cooking skills,” he says as he unpacks his bags.

 

Jaz hauls herself up on the counter and examines each product as he pulls it out of the bag. There’s red wine, white wine, balsamic vinegar, rice wine, dried chilies, bay leaves, nuts, dried fruits, chocolate, six different kinds of pasta, parmesan cheese, olives, capers, dried beans, and canned tomatoes. There’s even more, but Jaz loses track. Instead she turns the food over in her hands looking at which brands he’s chosen and those little details on the labels like the difference between a good kosher salt and a fine sea salt.

 

“Hannah’s never going to cook with all this,” she says.

 

His eyes stop on her face, “I know.”

 

“Then why?”

 

“Because you need to keep your hands busy or you’ll get into trouble. Since for the feasible future you don’t have a gun or Adam to handle -,”

 

“Hey!”

 

He grins at her and she can’t help but grin back, “I figure might as well put those hands to good use. You can feed Hannah and me.”

 

“Earn my keep?” She grins because she means it as a joke, but Amir shakes his head.

 

“You don’t have to earn anything with us, Jaz.”

 

***

 

_Adam,_

_I played tourist today. Hannah has work and Amir is at some sort of all-day retreat with the mosque he’s been attending here in D.C. I’ve done the tourist thing in this city plenty, but today I let myself just wander around. I rented a bike and rode from the National Mall to Georgetown. I visited Arlington, but the place I ended up was the Jefferson Memorial. It’s a little bit further out than some of the other’s, and it seems to sit on its’ own island. I like that. I stayed until the sky looked like this picture and I bought this postcard because I wanted to show you._

_Jaz_

***

 

Jaz has been in D.C. a week when Hannah announces Director Campbell has invited them over for dinner. She takes an Uber because Hannah is coming straight from the office, and she blinks when it’s just the three of them.

 

“What about Amir?” Jaz stutters.

 

Hannah waves a hand, “He’s home doing crossword puzzles.”

 

“And we,” Director Campbell holds up a bottle, “we have wine.”

 

Jaz has never had a girl’s night in her life and she approaches it as if going into complete chaos. Hannah and Director Campbell carry the conversation and Jaz sips gingerly at her cocktail. If her guys had been here she wouldn’t be like this, but very clearly Hannah had arranged for the evening because Jaz is a mess; she’s sleeping on an air mattress in the living room a woman she barely knows. Thoughtfulness like that spooks Jaz.

 

After dinner, they do fondu outside on the back patio around the director’s pool. The yard is landscaped and the ground is covered in those fancy flagstones with gravel between them like a real English garden.

 

Jaz hugs a pillow to her ribs and wishes McG was here to make a crass joke or Preach with his stories or most of all – Adam – with his arm around her shoulder, fingers idling on her arm, while he keeps up their part of the conversation. His eyes would crinkle up when there was a joke, and she could actually exhale.

 

Instead, Hannah dips a strawberry into chocolate and fixes her eyes on Jaz, “So what’s it like to kiss Adam Dalton?”

 

“Hannah,” Director Campbell chides, but the smile she gives Jaz is gentle, “You don’t have to answer that.”

 

“Ohthankgod.”

 

Hannah throws her head back and laughs. “She speaks!”

 

Patricia Campbell tops off Jaz’s wine glass and her own before settling back on the outdoor couch. She’s dressed in an oversized white button down and a smart pair of olive green shorts that somehow look stylish instead of utilitarian. Hannah is still in her dress from the office, but her shoes are kicked off and her toes are a fun magenta color. Jaz is in a black sundress from Old Navy, and while it had been perfect for a day in Apalachicola with Adam she feels underwhelming here in this place with these women.

 

Patricia sips her drink and nods that Jaz should too, “Jaz, just to clear the air. I’ve known about you and Dalton long before you guys got together.”

 

“Nothing happened in the field.”

 

“I know. He’d have said as much if it did.”

 

“I know this means I’ll need to be replaced. It’s too much to expect us to go back.”

 

Patricia tips her head, “Do you want to go back?”

 

Jaz thinks of the stupid postcards and the image she has of Adam finding a pile of them waiting for him at the RV, at their home. She’s not a romantic person; that’s Adam with his sweet gestures and open words. Putting herself down with pen and paper and mailing it to him feels right; it gives her the space to be honest and him the space to decide what to do. He deserves it.

 

“No,” she says. “I really don’t.”

 

***

 

 

 

_Adam,_

_I don’t want to say I expected to hear from you by now. You don’t owe me anything, but I know that if you’ve gone home you’re there and you’ve received my previous post cards. This isn’t a guilt trip, but rather fact. I want to be home, dancing barefoot in that cramped kitchen, with you pretending not to care about the Great British Bake-Off episode playing in the background, and me trying to follow Amir’s ridiculously complicated (and ridiculously good) recipe. Here I have all of that except you. I know I could show up at any point, but…I don’t know if I’m waiting on you or on myself. I just don’t know._

_Today it’s grey out and I opened the windows to Hannah’s apartment. I curled up on this dumb air mattress I’ve grown rather fond of and I cried a little. God, I hate telling you that. I hate telling anyone that, but if I am going to tell anyone it’s gonna be you._

_You don’t have to respond to these post cards. But do know they are me trying. For what, I’m not entirely sure._

_Jaz_

***

 

“Call me Patricia,” Director Campbell orders Jaz on their second girls’ night.

 

She’s been in D.C. for two weeks now and this time Jaz knows what the invite means.

 

So, she gets herself a pedicure before she shows up. It’s not for them or anyone really. It’s for herself. She will never line products up along the rim of her bathroom like Hannah or have a manicured lawn like their boss. But she likes the space leave gives her to worry about her wiggly toes and she likes her feet, she decides.

 

And between the pedicure and showing up at Patricia’s, Jaz goes to the gun range. The weight of the metal in her hand feels like an anchor securing her breath. She puts round after round into the targets and when she calls an Uber to take her to this strange ritual of women hovering over dessert, gossip, and alcohol, Jaz feels her blood thrumming. She likes feeling alive in the moment _and_ looking forward to what comes next, and she wonders if this is how other people live life.

 

After a dinner filled with shop talk (Jaz is happy to give Patricia her opinion on the latest accessories for the M40), they wander outside to Patricia’s beautiful back yard and Jaz tilts her head back for a second. The stars don’t look the same in Georgetown, and she gets why Adam misses them when they’re dimmed like that.

 

She settles into the couch and conversation more readily this time – until Patricia tells her to call her by her name.

 

“Only at something like this,” Jaz tips her glass toward the space between Patricia and Hannah.

 

“Fair enough.”

 

“So what’s the point of all of this?” she asks, feeling braver than she ought probably.  

 

Hannah shrugs, “I want to be your friend.”

 

“Let’s say I say I’m getting old enough I’m starting to think about legacy,” Patricia says, “and that means more women in the field and at the DIA.”

 

They’re good answers, but Jaz has a hard time believing they are the whole truth. She’s been ordered to sit in enough military doctors that she knows when she’s being handled.

 

“I call bullshit. You’re trying to get me to talk.”

 

Jaz respects the way Patricia’s face changes from something soft to schooled. It’s not meant to intimidate, but rather her way of getting down to business. Jaz feels the same way when she looks through a scope.

 

“Actually Jaz, we’re hoping you’d let us talk,” Patricia says.

 

Hannah coughs, “We are?”

 

“We are.” Patricia mirrors Jaz with her arm stretched out along the back of the couch. “And I wasn’t shitting you when I said I’m thinking about legacy.”

 

Tonight, instead of fondu and wine, it’s guacamole and margaritas. Jaz pushes the salt crystals off the rim of her glass. “I don’t get it,” she says. 

 

“Me either,” Hannah says. She sits between the two women and her eyes dart back and forth. “I just know girls nights always help. When my heart’s a mess.”

 

“Hannah,” Patricia looks at her analyst, “tell Jaz how you got the scar on your neck.”

 

Jaz inhales sharp. Amir hadn’t told her everything, but he’d said enough about how his girlfriend left the field. “You don’t have to,” Jaz says. “No one is owed an explanation.”

 

“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind telling you.”

 

So, Hannah does, and then at some point Patricia tells her own. Jaz notices there are parts they each leave out. It isn’t a confession as much as the truth. She sees glimpses of herself in their stories:  a determination to prove herself, jackasses who only wanted her on their terms, and a tipping point when she had to figure her shit out. There’s lots in their stories that aren’t her own:  Hannah grew up in the happiest, most well-adjusted family in the world and Patricia is a mother. But there is enough there that when Hannah says something about moving to D.C. feeling like her second option, Jaz takes a long drink to distract herself from crying. She doesn’t want to cry in front of them.

 

And then they are done and there’s a beat of silence. Jaz doesn’t know if she’s expected to reciprocate their candor or not. Thankfully, Patricia has a point to all of this.

 

“I just wanted you to know you’re already in a long line of women. That isn’t to apply more pressure on you to get your shit together. You’re allowed to be a mess, especially on leave.”

 

Hannah tips the last of her cocktail back, “Do you know how much work my anxiety is? Managing it? Accepting it?”

 

Patricia nods, but keeps her eyes on Jaz, “You said Hannah didn’t owe you an explanation, and that’s entirely true. But know I owe _you_. Not because it’s my job or cause we’re both women in a man’s world. But because Adam Dalton doesn’t deserve all the credit for bringing you onto the team. I choose you then, and as your friend, I’m choosing you now.”

 

*** 

  

_Adam,_

_Is it too soon for a bear joke? I saw this and thought of Leah. I hope you have lots of reasons to laugh today._

_Jaz_

 

***

 

Jaz takes up running at night as a way to give Hannah and Amir space in the apartment.

 

There are plenty of nights they steal away to Amir’s place, but if there is anything Jaz knows too well is what it feels like to live on top of people. She wants Hannah to have nights on her own couch with her ridiculously in love boyfriend. So she keeps Preach and McG updated on a group text about the sweet, but hilariously twitterpated Amir on the evenings she runs along the Potomac.

 

It’s on those long runs that she shifts through the moving pieces in her life:  owning an RV, falling in love with Adam, cooking lessons with Amir, and _her guys_.

 

That’s when this started. It wasn’t Adam or Elijah’s gift of the RV. It was those words she said aloud to Xander. Once said, they demanded space. They demanded she take what _her guys_ means seriously. It means believing that this is true:  there is some version of herself that is more whole when she relies on other people than she can be on her own. And she’s becoming that person; she’s in the middle of it.

 

On those long runs, when the street lamps glow and music filters out from the restaurants, Jaz gives herself permission to be a mess.

 

None of this filters down from her brain in a straight line. It’s a scattering of observations that seem to seep from a sieve. So she captures it on postcards and mails them to Adam.

 

***

 

 

_Adam,_

_That night in your room you asked about the scar on my knee, and I told you not to pity me. I am afraid of pity. I think it’s because it makes me feel exposed. Weak. But I wonder if pity is only possible from strangers and enemies? That when someone loves you, pity will never be their response? If someone wants to tell me that’s true I think I would believe them, and somehow that makes it easier to breathe._

_Jaz_

_p.s. The scar – your assumption is correct._

_***_

 

 

_Adam,_

_I’m visiting Preach and the girls. It’s so bright here. I don’t know if that’s California or just in my head. Toward the end of this past deployment I asked him what he was going to do when he got home, and he told me about this little restaurant and taking his family there. The first night I was in town he took all of us there and I swear my cheeks hurt from smiling. I like their family so much. Afterwards, he and I sat in his driveway with our backs against the garage door and drank beers. He told me this might have been his last run. He doesn’t know._

_Jaz_

_***_

 

__

 

_Adam,_

_My whirlwind travels continue. I’m here with McG and Amy. His mom won’t stop hugging me, and I don’t entirely know why. When I asked McG he just rolled his eyes and said something about it not being a chore for her. Don’t overthink, he said. I know you overthink things, and I used to consider myself someone who just acts. But I’ve written you at least two dozen of these postcards by now with no response. I haven’t thought about what I’ll do if you never do._

_Jaz_

_***_

 

 

_Adam_

 

_Fuck, I wish you were here right now. I was stupid. So unbelievably stupid. Since Amir’s family keeps an apartment in the city (WHO DOES THAT?!?!) I added New York on to my trip at the last minute. I’ve had all this time to think and I thought it’d be good to walk through my old neighborhood. Fucking idiotic move._

_Never planned on seeing my parents and I didn’t. I guess that’s a plus at least. But I did have a panic attack there on the sidewalk outside my old building. I had to hide in an alley with my head between my legs just to keep from passing out. No one saw it. I figured it out. But I wanted to tell you because it hurts. I want someone to know that._

_Jaz_

_***_

When Jaz gets back to D.C. it’s been five weeks without a word from Adam.

 

She doesn’t know what to do, but she isn’t going to put any of her guys in the middle. Since Amir got back from Pennsylavanie, they’ve talked around Adam Dalton. Same with Preach and McG when she visited them. Sure, he came up. But _them_ and her feelings had been off the table. And she hasn’t told anyone about the post cards – not even Hannah, who has become a friend, or Patricia, who has become someone she trusts. Her window for just showing up at the RV has closed. Clearly, he still isn’t ready to talk and he might never be.

 

So she rolls her shoulders back and goes for a run. She bakes and reads ridiculous novels. She goes to the firing range and beats her personal best for the M40. The first sign her modicum of peace is starting to fray happens when she can’t sleep. No matter how buffeted in by pillows she makes herself Jaz lies awake two nights in a row.

 

On the second night she opens up Netflix on her phone, but the queue has all the things she watched with him and she gives up. She puts on her tennis shoes and at four a.m. takes an Uber down to the National Mall to run. The spotlights still shine bright against the stone and most of the park benches are occupied by the city’s homeless covered in sheets so they look like part of the white granite landscape that is the capital.

 

Jaz’s breathing cuts through the morning as her lungs press for oxygen. She runs harder. Underneath her feet gravel skids and she runs harder. Sweat drips along the line of her spine. She runs harder. Tears well up and blur her vision and she runs harder.

 

Then the sun breaks the horizon, light spilling over the water and this place and her. It is a crack against the sky and Jaz can see both:  the fading night stars and the dawn.

 

She stops running.

 

***

 

 

_Adam,_

_This will be my last postcard._

_I mean the front mostly as a joke. But it feels a little true. Really it isn’t about not trusting you. God, I trust you with everything. Even now after all this silence. Even when you’re smug or pretentious. I trusted you more than myself, and that’s the problem._

_In one of the first cards I sent you I said I couldn’t think of how to describe the panic I felt when Faith yelled at me in that hospital room. Alone. That’s how I felt. It was just me and my feelings and your sister pointed out I didn’t belong to anyone. Not the way family does. I’ve figured that out now. I felt alone and it wasn’t a new feeling. It’s why I’ve never liked leave. It’s why Elijah left me that damn RV. It’s why I went dark the first time._

_This time started out that way too, but I need to make a change. I can’t keep existing like this – living from deployment to deployment. Preach might not ever go into the field again, and Elijah died before he ever got to live in his home. I’ve got to learn to trust myself, and given the volume of your silence, I guess I’ll start by trusting I’ll figure out what comes next._

_Jaz_

_p.s. You should know – I love you._

 

***

 

Jaz has never been a believer in fate or the universe. But two of her best friends are men of faith and the timing is eerie. She’s walking back from the store, having just dropped that last post card into the mail, when she comes upon Sophie Dalton standing on the side walk outside Hannah’s apartment.

 

Jaz stops in the middle of the side walk. Sophie is looking at her phone and the numbers on the building. She’s in a suit and looking the opposite of how Jaz saw her last, a desperately happy mother holding her baby girl tight. She’s in stiletto heels and that makes her seem even more official.

 

“Sophie?”

 

The other woman wheels around and exhales in relief, “Oh thank god. I couldn’t figure out which apartment is Hannah’s.”

 

“Um, she’s at work.”

 

“I know.” They just stare at each other until Sophie blinks. “Oh! I’m not here to see her. It’s just I had her number in my phone and not yours.”

 

“You’re here to see me?”

 

There’s a flare of panic in her chest, but Jaz swallows it back. If something had happened to Adam, Sophie wouldn’t have put on a power suit to tell Jaz. _(Truth be told:  she might have, but that’s not the point!)_

 

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Jaz suggests the park down the block, but Sophie waves her off. “I meant, can I take you to lunch?”

 

They end up at the Westin on the national harbor. Sophie seems in no hurry. She carries the conversation and stays on safe topics:  the nieces and what she’s doing in D.C. and the weather. It isn’t until a waiter brings them the salade niçoise that Sophie orders both of them that she finally mentions Adam.

 

“I need to know – are you in love with my brother?”

 

Jaz thinks of the post card already dropped into the mailbox; there’s no point now in denying it.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Then what the FUCK are you two idiots doing?”

 

People across the restaurant turn their heads, but Sophie doesn’t seem to care. In a distant part of Jaz’s brain, she adds this to her list of reasons she likes Sophie Dalton.

 

“I screwed up.”

 

“So did my sister,” Sophie says, “and she’s sorry, by the way. Not that I’m apologizing for her. She can do that herself. But Adam did too. He’s great, but he’s not perfect. The man is trying to be too many things to too many people.”

 

_God, she loves him._

 

Jaz bites her lip because there are the tears that brim sometimes when she thinks about what kind of man he is. Of how leads not from a place of dominance, but by standing side-by-side with his team and his family. Of how he grew up too fast and the joy it was this summer to watch him live in that RV and just _be_. Of how he’s grumpy in the morning and can sleep through anything, and how being good at what he does makes him kinder rather than thoughtless.

 

_She loves him so damn much._

 

“He’s made it pretty clear my screw up was too much,” Jaz says.

 

Sophie narrows her eyes, “How?”

 

“He hasn’t responded to a single one of my messages.”

 

“What messages?”

 

She feels like an idiot telling Adam’s sister about the postcards, but what has she got to lose now? So she tells Sophie about sending them to the RV and the six weeks of silence. A few tears escape when she gets to the end and the one she put in the mail just the morning. And when she finally stops talking Sophie laughs.

 

She laughs and there are tears rolling down her cheeks, “Oh my dear lord, you can’t make this shit up. Jaz, hon, he’s not in Florida.”

 

If the floor had opened up just then, Jaz would have felt the same as she does right now in this moment.

 

“What?”

 

“He’s been in Pennsylvania this whole time. Waiting like a stubborn mule for _you.”_

“He doesn’t hate me?”

 

Now there are tears and Jaz makes no attempt to stop them.

 

Sophie rolls her eyes, “He misses you so damn much he’s basically been putting the girls through a mini boot camp and calling it family time. Leah asked me if I’d buy her makeup for the first time the other day, and my heart practically leapt out of my throat. Then I realized she wanted camo makeup. So she and Uncle Adam could practice out in the woods once she gets her cast off.”

 

Jaz just blinks. “But Amir said Adam said he was going home. I…I assumed that meant home as in he was going someplace other than Carlisle. I’m an idiot for thinking he meant the RV.”

 

“No,” Sophie says softly, “I don’t think you are an idiot. I think know him better than his sisters.”

 

Jaz leans both of her elbows on the table, “He must think I’m an unfeeling bitch to just _leave_ like that and not say a word. That I thought I didn’t owe him anything, after everything….”

 

Sophie leans across the table and grips Jaz’s hands in her own. It’s a bit uncomfortable for Jaz, but only because it’s unfamiliar.

 

“I think the one part of Adam you might not see as clearly as you do the rest of him is the part of him that loves you so damn much.”

 

There are a million thoughts pressing on Jaz at once and she can’t make time to process what Sophie’s saying.

 

“I…I need to tell him,” she pushes her chair back, “I need to go.”

 

“Can I ask a favor? Give me three days. There’s a conversation his sisters need to have with him, and then he’ll be there. At the RV. Like you thought he was the whole time. Can you give me that?”

 

***

 

While she waits, Jaz has one last girls night with Hannah and Patricia. This time she insists on scotch and she makes a triple layer chocolate peanut butter cake that is pure sin. They eat it without plates and drink too much. Hannah has already heard the story, but Jaz recounts it for Patricia.

 

“God, we’re both idiots,” Jaz smiles into her glass.

 

“Feelings are hard,” Hannah sighs. “I think Amir might propose and part of me resents that I didn’t ask first, but now he’s got a ring and -,”

 

Patricia chokes on her cake, “So you found an actual ring?”

 

“Oh yeah, and I never would have if it hadn’t been for all those nights I stayed at his place so we could have loud sex.”

 

Jaz scrunches her nose, “You’re welcome?”

 

Hannah tosses her hair and exhales a long sigh of satisfaction as if remembering said sex. Then a tiny grin crept over the other woman’s face, “Know where he’s keeping it? In his combat boots, the ones he was wearing on the mission where we first met, the one in Columbia.”

 

“And these are the men people call the toughest of the tough,” Patricia muses.

 

***

 

_Adam,_

_I’m coming home._

_Jaz_

***

 

She stands outside the home Elijah had given her and remembers what his last words had been to her: _Live a little extra for me…believe me…we both deserve it._ There in the window of her RV is the blue vase she bought in Apalachicola and in it are flowers.

 

_He got her flowers._

 

Her throat tightens because he doesn’t know she’s here. He got her flowers without any indication that she’d show up here in the rain tonight. She’d gone dark and he’d come home, tucking flowers into the window like a beacon.

 

_She doesn’t deserve him._

 

Jaz exhales to soothe out the emotions in her chest. The panic is still there, but it’s always going to be there. Her fears will never go away. She thinks of what Adam told her months ago around that campfire – that guy – was always going to be a part of him. She’d thought it then and she thinks it now; Adam Dalton is easy to love. She knows this and she knows the man he was talking about. She saw him with Hoffman and when Leah was missing. Still, she loves him and loving him is the easiest part of all of this.

 

Jaz exhales again as she stands there in the rain. She’s going to try to believe the same might be true for her. It feels like trying to wear clothes that aren’t her own. Even with the part of her that expects to be left out and let down, that she will never deserve to be someone’s priority, even with those messy pieces maybe, just maybe, he could love her back?

 

She takes a deep breath as she remembers something Hannah had said when she told Jaz how she got those scars on her neck. She’d said part of making peace with herself was deciding that it was a fact and not a hidden hope:  she is loved. Very, very much loved.

 

Adam Dalton is a different category from the rest of them, but she is loved so if he’s too angry at her for leaving or has changed his mind Jaz knows she’ll have a broken heart, but she won’t be alone. Somehow, Elijah had been right – living starts by the most mundane of steps:  unpack your belongings, stay a while in a place, and buy a damn vase.

 

It’s the vase in the window that makes her choice to go inside a bit easier. So, Jaz takes a steadying breath, shifts her go-bag on her shoulder, and opens the RV door.

 

***

 

It’s almost like one of her post cards, except it’s Adam there barefoot in the kitchen. He turns as she walks up the steps into the RV, dripping rain water on the floor, and she watches his eyes go wide. She wants to cross the space between them. Instead, she waits. He stills. Jaz feels the prick of tears and she exhales again, pleading with her body to wait. To see what happens next.

 

“Jaz –,”

 

At the sound of his voice, she can’t hold back the emotions any longer.

 

“I got your home wrong,” she says. She doesn’t know if it’s rainwater or tears on her face, but before she can decide or speak or move, he’s there with his hands on her face and his whole body tips into her.  

 

“I love you.”

 

His nose skims her own and she looks up to see blue eyes she’s looked at thousands of times, but she’s never seen this look in them; she’s never seen this kind of desperate happiness.

 

He tugs her go-bag off her shoulder, throws it on the table, unzips her jacket, and peels the wet material off of her. She trembles when his palms run along her bare arms and he thinks she’s cold because he’s gathering her close as if he can warm her from the outside in. He presses his forehead to her own, “I love you, and I was such an idiot for thinking I needed a plan before I told you.”

 

His wide hands span her ribs as if he’s caught her and he isn’t letting go. She holds onto his wrists to keep herself steady. “I’m home,” she says in a rush, “I mean I love you too, but I’m home. That’s what I wanted to say. That you’re my home and I’m so –,”  

 

There’s so much more to say, but he kisses her. It’s hot and fierce and without any reservation. She sighs at the sensation of his calloused hands skimming along her jaw. Her hair sticks to her face and he laughs a little when she tries to shake it back, but it won’t move.

 

“Why did you stand outside for so long?”

 

Adam keeps her boxed in the space of his hips. Jaz uses the hair tie on her wrist to pull her hair up into a top knot, and tries a little levity to give them both a chance to breathe “Isn’t that what you did the night you showed up dramatically at my RV?”

 

This earns her a smile. She smiles back and Adam murmurs “What am I gonna do with you?”

His hands are on her and an absent finger drags down her t-shirt along the length of her spine.

 

Jaz steps so she’s pressed up against him, “Whatever you want,” she says and she’s rewarded with Adam Dalton licking his lips.

 

Whenever she imagined their first time, it had been desperate and yearning. There’d always been a sensation of _hurry_ as if they were already out of time. She decides that tonight time isn’t going to cheat them out of _this_ ; Jaz isn’t going anywhere.

 

He exhales a shaky breath, “Jaz, I got your post cards. They were here waiting for me. We should talk -,”

 

But she stops him, “You love me?”

 

“So fucking much.”

 

“And I love you. So Adam? Just fucking take me to bed.” She almost whines it, and while she knows it isn’t the sexiest thing in the world it works because he exhales a self-deprecating laugh.

 

“I just want to do this right. After everything we’ve been through. I want it to be right.” She sees it in the way his eyes slant down and sideways, away from her.

 

 _He’s nervous._ Adam Dalton, army captain, tactician, top of his field, doesn’t know what to do. She cups her hands at the back of his neck where the skin is smooth and lets her fingers play with the short, bristly hairs there. He’s got a cowlick in the back that she’s never noticed before and she smiles because she hopes that isn’t the first new discovery about him she makes tonight.

 

“You love me,” she says with playful bravado, “so show me.”

 

He smirks. It’s half-humor, half-exasperation and she likes the way his eyes crinkle in the corners because she knows it’s because of her. He’d told her as much that first night in the hotel. That’s when the wanting began - with a look like that.

 

She wants to both hoard that smirk and discover new expressions:  what is the arch of his neck when she settles with him in her, the gasp on his lips when she starts to move, and the smile when he hears what he does to her on her own lips.

 

At each image, Jaz feels the want in her belly grow and she arches an eye-brow at his smirk.

“That’s an order,” she says.   

 

His eyes darken, “That we’re gonna come back to,” he says, “but first this.”

 

His fingers intertwine with her own and he holds their hands between them, staring at the image of her there with him.

 

“I’m here,” she whispers. “Right here.”

 

“I’m so fucking happy,” he whispers it more to himself than her, and Jaz feels a blooming in her chest.

 

She’s so grateful she gets to be part of this, him happy. She tugs on his hands and leads him to the back of the RV. She backs up until she feels the edge of the bed bump the back of her knees. She stumbles and Adam steadies her. His hands splay on her back and Jaz lets her own drop down to the hem of his t-shirt.

 

Her nails skim the skin there above his jeans. He watches her as she lifts his shirt so he can shrug it off, and when it’s gone he stands there still as her fingers trail along the muscles of his shoulders, ribs, and across the plane of his stomach.

 

The lights in the front are on, but the back bedroom is dark. A window is open somewhere because the rain is around them. She catalogues the goosebumps on his skin as she touches him and the way his breath hitches when she presses her nose into his sternum. Jaz dares to meet his eyes and she’s never seen them so dark and so blue at the same time, like the ocean when you are so far out to sea there is no land in sight.

 

Back when they’d been pretending this wasn’t what it is, when they were sleeping on that narrow couch as if it kept them safe, she’d find this exact spot on him and press into him. He was soft there and back then she’d told herself touching him there was safe, innocuous. She smiles and kisses him in that spot.

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing,” she mutters, “just remembering how stubborn I was to think I wasn’t in love with you.”

 

She’s still sitting on the bed and he’s standing there in front of her with his jeans hanging low on his hips. She palms the back of his legs, tugs him forward so his knees brush the bed, and lets her hands drift up his ass.

 

He gives a shaky laugh. “What’re doing down there?”

 

Jaz bites her lip, “Having fun.” 

 

She lets her hands drift along the waist band and she notices they aren’t like the jeans he wears on base, worn in and baggy. These hug his thighs and she hums in appreciation, “I like your trendy new jeans. Your sisters pick them out?”

 

“Let’s not talk about my sisters right now,” he chokes, and Jaz throws her head back in laughter because that answers her question.

 

Her fingers slip open the button and the jeans hang lower now so she can appreciate that marvelous V thing his hips do. McG loves to shows his off with low slung khakis, but she likes knowing she’s the only one who sees Adam’s. She hooks one arm along the back of his leg and tugs so he’s practically straddling her.

 

Then she presses her mouth, open, to the ridge of his erection through the denim

 

“Fuck, Jaz.”

 

His hands hold onto her shoulders for balance and she allows herself to indulge in Adam Dalton. Her lips trail along the lines of those muscles on his long, lean stomach and her hands anchor his hips, holding him there as her teeth scrape his hip bone.

 

That earns her a rasp in his voice, “Honey, if you don’t want teenage Adam we’re gonna need to move this -,” and then when slips his zipper down and cups him through his boxer briefs, “  
_'ant khatar shaded_.”

 

She laughs at his guttural Arabic, “You love it.”

 

He cups the back of her head and tugs her up, “I really do,” he says, “but now it’s my turn.”

 

Jaz shivers. She actually shivers and she catches the smirk on Adam’s face when he hears her inhale. Her instinct to put him in his place.

 

But then he spins her. He fucking spins her and the thrill of him taking control like that makes her wet with _want_. He bands one arm around her waist to pull her close and with the other he palms her breast. She leans backwards into him and closes her eyes as his head drops down to the curve of her neck and finds that pulse point.

 

He sucks there on that sensitive skin and holds her up with one hand while the other runs along her rib cage and to the button on her jeans. With a confidant flick of his wrist, her pants are open and his hand is cupping her through her underwear.

 

“God, you feel good,” he says there rooted at her neck.

 

His leg nudges her onto her knees on the bed and she follows his lead because she’s lost in the sensation of his beard against her skin, his breath tickling a stray strand of hair that’s fallen out of her ponytail, and his fingers stroking the seam of her through the simple cotton.

 

A stray part of her brain remembers that her sports bra and every day underwear aren’t particularly sexy, but then his deft fingers nudge the cotton out of the way and he touches her there for the first time.

 

She gasps because it’s been so long in coming to this point.

 

It isn’t just the feel of him and her or the release of him skimming that part of her where want and need are the same. It’s the hitch in his own breath against her neck and the fact that the feeling isn’t just skin and sensation. There in her chest she feels it too:   her heart hammers with the lapping wave of realization.

 

_This is us._

It’s not just her. It isn’t just him. It’s them. He loves her and she loves him, and that binds them together. It hits her like the persistent gentleness of a wave upon the shore, the feeling of this happening between them right now. It’s what he said to her, _I love you_ and how he’d put flowers in that vase for her with no guarantee that she’d come home.

 

It’s faith.

 

In her and in them, and in that moment the _feeling_ of that reality catches up with her head. Not being alone, belonging to other people, is always a leap of faith. Jaz has always worn her emotions first, but this one takes her by surprise. It’s deeper and scarier than anything she’s felt before.

 

His fingers curl into her, and he’s struggling to find a rhythm against the constraints of her jeans sinking around her hips. All of it is too much and not enough at the same time, but Jaz doesn’t shrink from it. She is brave, after all.

 

“Adam.”

 

He must hear the desperation in her voice because he lets her pull away. His hand slips out of her and she whimpers from the loss. She turns on her knees so she’s facing him.

 

A laugh escapes and she strips. “You too, soldier.”  

 

He stands there stupefied and it’s not because she’s giving him a sexy striptease. She tries to shimmy out of her jeans with as much grace as possible, but it’s hardly a show. When they come off his eyes travel the length of her legs and the curve of her. He settles on her breasts still in her sports bra and she nods toward his pants. Adam rolls his eyes and with military efficiency shucks the last of his clothes.

 

She whistles and though it’s dark she’ll forever swear his ears turn bright red. He steps up to the bed, his erection bobbing against his stomach, and it takes all the control Jaz has to keep her hands to her sides. She does because he’s chewing on his bottom lip, the one she needs to spend more time on in the very near future.

 

He points to her bra, “May I?”

 

Jaz holds her arms up and she doesn’t try to hold back her groan when his knuckles skim her nipple. With the flick of his wrist the last of the artificial barriers between them are gone, and Jaz feels a swell of pride at the look on his face as he takes her in.

 

“You’re beautiful,” he presses a swift kiss to her lips, but she chases it.

 

Her hands reach up to cup his jaw and she lets herself be lowered to the bed as he teases the seam of her lips with his tongue. She opens up beneath him and folds herself around his body. He slots between her hips as she curves a leg around him. Her heel presses into his ass and she smiles against his lips because it’s a good ass. She thinks of his jeans and how tomorrow she’s going to oogle him in them knowing exactly what that ass feels like under her touch.

 

“What’s so funny?”

 

She shakes her head refusing to give up this one secret. Instead, she distracts him by arching her back so her center presses up against his cock.

 

They make out, pressing against one another like a tease, determined to draw the other’s need out further. It leaves them chasing one another:  his fingers curling in and out of her until she rolls over and pumps him. It leaves him cursing again in languages she doesn’t speak. She’s slippery with want and there’s no reason not to get on to the main show except that she’s greedy for all of the time they’ve missed. Tonight, she is going to take time rather than chase it. The difference is in believing that this isn’t going to be taken away from her. That _they_ are real.

 

“Jaz,” Adam rasps.

 

She looks up the length of him, his cock in her hand, and her lips hovering there on his tip. She’s rewarded with that arch of his neck and his hand grasping for her. She leans forward to take his hand, and her breasts brush against his erection. His hips jump off the mattress. She files that fact away for later, and she crawls up the length of his body. His hands roam over her and she smiles against his lips.

 

“Yes?”

 

“I need to be inside you.”

 

“D.C,” Jaz says as she settles back on his thighs. She rewarded with that look of confusion so rarely seen on Adam Dalton’s face.

 

“What?”

 

“When the wanting began. It began in D.C.”

 

She arches her back so her breasts are there for him to take and it works. He sits up, those abs working in a way that makes her feel all sorts of things that are girly and ridiculous, and his mouth is on her. His tongue pulls her breast taunt in his mouth and those wide, capable hands cup her ass. She cards her fingers his hair and lets her own neck drop back. “I asked you. I figure it’s fair to tell you.”

 

“When in D.C.?” he mutters against her breast bone before turning his attention to the other breast.

 

She works herself against his cock, rubbing up and down, and the need it’s building in her makes it hard to find words, “These past six weeks,” she whispers “I’ve wanted _you_ for…Actually, I can’t remember not wanting you.”

 

He smiles against her skin and she pulls on his hair for that.

 

“Don’t get cocky.”

 

“Too late.”

 

There is just the sound of the rain and them, breathing in and out. She’s so wet and thrumming with need that part of her is screaming why hasn’t she guided him into her yet? But there is something he needs to know. It’s the last confession between them.

 

“I’ve wanted you, but it wasn’t until this last time I left, that I wanted _us_.” She lets go of him and covers her face with both hands and shakes her head, “that didn’t come out right.”

 

“Hey, hey,” he whispers, and she feels him slow his hips so that the friction between them lengthens and his hand comes up to cup her jaw. The sway of his hips slows to an almost complete stop and Jaz realizes he’s waiting for her to open her eyes and look at him.

 

She does, and when her eyes meet his she remembers why she choose that damn vase in the first place.

 

The vase is the color of Adam’s eyes on the most ordinary of days. As much as she loves the way they look at her now, darkened with _want,_ and how they look when he smiles, a blue that reminds her of water in sunlight, despite all of that her favorite color is the everyday Adam. It’s the most mundane shade, a little too serious, always watchful, and ultimately the bravest person she knows, and that’s the color of that vase she chose. It’s who he is every day, and that’s the last confession she has to make to him.

 

“It wasn’t until the last few weeks that I wanted an _us_ that included me. The everyday me.”

 

His smile is soft, “I love everyday you.”

 

She nods because now she believes him.

 

With that there is nothing left between them, and Jaz guides him into her. She hears his gasp as he fills her and she moans because it feels so good. Her hands balance on his ribs and she closes her eyes because it’s just so much. This man she loves independent of loving her back, this good man, is here with her and Jaz is damn grateful for this beautiful moment.

 

She moves first, curling her hips and sinking back down along the ridge of him.

 

“Talk to me, Jaz,” he says, and she answers with a moan.

 

“That’s my girl,” he says.

 

His hands grip her hips and she lets herself lean back so he’s hitting a different angle inside of her. He plants his feet into the mattress to meet her thrust for thrust. It’s perfect and yet she’s greedy for more so she leans back, putting her hands on his thighs, and then – there – he hits that spot in her that is the center of everything.

 

“You look so fucking perfect,” he says between gasps. “Ride me, honey.”

 

She opens her eyes at the endearment and it’s the hottest thing she’s seen in her life:  the concentration in Adam Dalton’s eyes as she works herself on him. She glances down to see where he enters her and the way her body takes him in. He’s big and it stretches her to the point that it hurts a little, but the pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. It’s just the rain and the sound of them, their bodies so honed to fight, finding another expression.

 

And then the burn of her arms and legs from working and holding herself up is too much.

“Adam,” she cries out, and he understands without words. He flips them and Jaz is limp from the building pleasure in her. He pulls one of her legs up to her chest and sinks back down into her. There’s a spot somewhere in her even deeper than before and he finds it.

 

“Fuck,” he groans.

 

Whatever plans for _slow_ Jaz had end right now.

 

“Babe, don’t hold back,” she gasps and her weightless arms hold onto his biceps. The muscles move under her hands as he pistons in and out of her. The friction of his cock against her clit has her shaking her head. It’s all too much, but he draws her eyes open with kisses pressed to her cheeks, shoulders and nose.

 

“Look at me, Jasmine.”

 

There he is. Blue eyes so clear and Jaz trusts him to get them through this, that she can let go and he will with her. So she matches his gaze with her own and it’s cleareyed. He picks up the pace and her hands slip as sweat gathers on their skin. She remembers his command to talk to him.

 

“I love how I drive you crazy,” she breathes, “and how you feel inside of me and the way your hair sticks up in the morning.”

 

Her orgasm is there. She can feel her body perched on the cusp of that wave. It’s building and she groans his name.

 

“Adam, I need…”

 

“I’m. so. close,” he pants. “You are. So tight. It’s fucking perfect how I feel. Inside you.”

 

And then – finally – he thrusts and hits that perfect spot in her and Jaz tips over the edge.

 

“Adam!” she cries out.

 

Her walls clench down on him and she can feel her body greedily grasping for him. He’s there. He falls over her, his own orgasm coming too as he fucks her through her own. The wave is unending and she lets herself be taken by it. Her skin ripples with sensation and her breath is short. His skin tastes like the ocean and she presses her lips to his shoulder as he curls around her. His beard tickles her shoulder when he kisses the hollow of her throat.

 

“Fuck,” he gasps.

 

“That is what that is called,” she smiles lazily. She doesn’t even bother to open her eyes.

 

For that, he nips gently at her neck. “Such a smartass.”

 

“But you love it.”

 

“I do. I really, really do.”

 

***

 

Jaz wakes up to the sound of cicadas and she remembers she isn’t on Hannah’s air mattress. She’s home with Adam and they left a window open last night. She blanches a bit to think their neighbors or even Ivan could have heard them last night, but in reality, she doesn’t care.

 

Instead, she yawns and turns over. Adam is right there against her back, curved over her, and she grins because she’ll never need those dumb couch pillows again. He’s awake because his hold on her tightens. She presses a butterfly kiss to his sternum.

 

“Good morning,” she says.

 

“Good morning,” he says and then he groans, “I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’m a little sore from last night.”

 

Jaz is too, but she’s not going to bypass the opportunity to tease him, “Your old age is showing.”

 

His wide hands splay along her back and instead of meeting her smile with his own, Adam exhales.

 

“Jaz, there’s something you need to know.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to Google, "'ant khatar shaded" translates to "You're a menace." If you speak Arabic, please feel free to correct me. 
> 
> Fab5, as always, all the love. 
> 
> You can find me at kyrieanne on Tumblr and kyrieanneflails on Twitter.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ::ducks::

**_a year later_ **

 

There’s that _jolt_ of wheels hitting the tarmac and Jaz closes her eyes. She exhales. _She’s home._

 

Almost.

 

For the first time in her career she’s rotating home alone. Their debrief took place in Germany now that Patricia and the whole team are stationed in Europe. McG and Amir offered to come with her, but Jaz told them to worry over Simon instead of her. Their new communications specialist will never be Preach, but Jaz likes him well enough.

 

_“Isn’t fair,” Amir had grumbled those first few weeks after Simon joined the team, “why aren’t you as hostile with him?”_

 

_“I’ve evolved,” Jaz laughed._

 

_McG snorted, “Amir, I’m sure Hannah will tell you you’re her favorite if you ask.”_

 

_Amir answered McG by hooking the horseshoe around the rebar with the perfect ting of metal hitting home._

 

Jaz waved Amir off because Hannah was already there in Germany, absently twisting the engagement ring on her left hand each time the team had an op. Amir flying stateside made no sense; his home was already right there. They deserved to get lost along the Rhine just like they planned. Jaz had listened to the two of them day dream about the getaway for at least a month now. That’s what she gets for being friends with both of them. She wasn’t going to be responsible for delaying their excursion simply because _home_ for her is more complicated.

 

_“You can always come with us,” Amir had offered their last night together in Germany._

 

_“I’d rather watch McG do a strip tease.”_

 

_“Hey! I’m very coordinated.”_

 

_She took a swig of her beer,“This isn’t about you.”_

 

_Later, after Amir hugged her tight and whispered, “Bil tawfiq,” in her ear, Jaz turned down McG’s offer to go with her too._

 

_“North Carolina isn’t really on the way to Montana,” she frowned._

 

_McG shrugged his shoulders in that way he does, “I’m not in any rush.”_

 

_“Bullshit. Amy McGuire will not be kept waiting.”_

 

_“She’s not there,” he concentrated on peeling the label off his beer._

 

_“Where is she?”_

 

_“Cruise with the new boyfriend.”_

 

_Jaz had spent time at the McGuire homestead and she’d seen enough pictures of McG as a ruddy, young boy to recognize the same look on his face in that moment. She chose not to tease him about being jealous of his mom of all people. A year ago she might have, but instead Jaz knocked his elbow with her own._

 

_“You’re still her favorite.”_

 

_McG gave her that shit eating grin, “Honey, I’m every woman’s favorite.”_

 

_She feigned annoyance and there was a beat of silence between them. Her eyes settled on the empty chairs around the table and the memory of who wasn’t there._

 

_“Thanks for the offer,” she said, “but this is something I’ve gotta do on my own.”_

 

So Jaz grabbed a seat on a military transport from Germany to Fort Bragg because that is where her RV is and all the decisions she needs to make. And now as the plane comes to a stop on the tarmac and those around her are moving, unbuckling their seat restraints, preparing to depart, Jaz trembles.

 

She thinks about how a little over a year ago she returned stateside. She’d trembled then too, but for different reasons. Then she’d been terrified for Preach, grieving Elijah, and more than a little lost. Leave had been about waiting for the next deployment then, and now a year later it’s something much messier.

 

_“How’d you do it?”_

 

_Jaz had called Preach up a month before the team rotated home. She caught him at a soccer match for one of his girls and she smiled at the shrieks of parents when one team scored. It felt like music from where she was sitting on the other side of the world.She imagined the field of green grass and the bright Southern California sun and the smell of little girls sweating as they ran across the field. This is why I serve, she thought. So families can spend their Saturdays at soccer games and little girls can play without having to worry about being good or bad._

 

_“Do what?”_

 

_“Have yourself split in two, between the field and home?”_

 

_Preach chuckled, and Jaz was grateful for this man because when she talked like that he understood._

 

_“I decided that tension was a sign I was doing something right. That I’d achieved something worth being uncomfortable for.”_

 

You can take Preach out of the active duty, but you’d never take his damn _isms_ out of the man. Jaz turns those words over as she deplanes into the humid August air of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Her eyes scan the tarmac automatically, but of course there is no one there. No one is expecting her.

 

Preach called it doing something right, this feeling of being pulled apart by competing lives, of wanting two things that are diametrically opposed. She isn’t sure what she’d call it, but she’s gained enough wisdom in the past year to not run away from the tremble within her. It’s a sign that there are feelings there, neatly compartmentalized for the sake of the mission, that demand her attention.

 

Jaz shifts her bag on her shoulder and presses through the crowds of people, some service people and some family members meeting loved ones coming home. She threads through the families and keeps her head down. She tells herself that her own reunion will come. But first she has a choice to make and that starts with a phone call.

 

***

 

There’s the sharp _rap_ of knuckles on the RV door and Jaz startles.

 

She’d gotten lost in a cookbook Amir recommended and the author’s description of making her own pasta. That is on Jaz’s list she’s kept during this last deployment, _things to try once home._

 

But there is the silence as the person on the other side of the door waits for her to answer it. She pushes the hair that’s fallen out her pony tail out of her eyes. She cut it shoulder length on a whim a few months back, desperate for something in the mirror to look different. She wanted her reflection to resemble the way she felt on the inside, a confusion of awkward change.

 

She pushes the door open and there he is, Xander.

 

“Jaz Kahn, I never imagined you owning an RV,” he says as he steps up into the vehicle.

 

After her call to him two days ago, Jaz rented a car and driven to the storage facility where her RV was sitting, sealed and safe, throughout her deployment. She’d almost cried when she saw it, and when she walked in and smelled _him_ lingering there as if they had been waiting together for her to return, she had cried. The RV park she’s staying at just outside Fayetteville is nothing spectacular. She texted Ivan photos with the shrug emoji and his reply had been so him, _come home anytime_ , and she almost cried again.

 

“It’s part of the story,” she says now to Xander and covers up her nervousness by getting them both beers.

 

“I like stories,” Xander says.

 

They settle outside under the awning with a makeshift meal of snack foods spread out in front of them. It takes her two and a half beers to catch Xander up to that morning after.

 

“What did he have to tell you?”

 

She tips her head as if he doesn’t already know, but Jaz knows this is part of the deal. She has to say things aloud, put the words out there, to name it, before she can deal with it.

 

“He made the decision without me.”

 

“To leave the DIA. Go back to special forces.”

 

“To walk away.”

 

Xander took the final swig of the single beer he’d been nursing. Their conversation wasn’t part of anything official. She’d called him and asked for that thing he did, the listening and uncovering thing.

 

“Something’s haunting me,” she’d told him over the phone, “and I need help figuring it out.”

 

“And that made you mad?” Xander asks now.

 

Jaz shakes her head. She recalls that morning after:her muscles sore from their night, the way he filled her bed so much that half of her pillows ended up on the floor, and the feeling of being pulled tight against him as he told her.

 

“No, it didn’t,” she says, “I love him. He loves me. I want him to do what makes him happy.”

 

They’d talked about it in between the sex. She doesn’t feel the need to tell Xander _everything_ , but she does recall the last few weeks they had left in her leave. How they took the RV on a road trip west because that was the general direction that had the most space. In New Orleans, they listened to jazz, buzzed on Hurricanes, and eaten their weight in seafood. There had been a tour of the Alamo and a dozen other military stops along the way where he told her the stories he loved so much and she pressed her lips to his neck right above his t-shirt collar because she could.

 

And finally they made it to Colorado where he attempted to teach her to fly fish, but her patience did not transfer from guns to nature. So instead out there on on BLM land she tested his patience by sunning herself topless along the river while he fished, and they laughed until they cried because he tripped trying to get his waders off, and once he did they fucked there on the grass in broad day light, just the two of them and their home.

 

Jaz doesn’t give Xander all of these details, but she does summarize the important ones.

 

“Patricia recommended him,” she says, “and it was inevitable anyway. A captain is only supposed to do three years commanding a team like ours. A billet like SWTG company commander doesn’t come open every day. Someone up the chain was promoted and if he was going to advance it felt like the best time. Plus, there was us. I knew he couldn’t stay my CO if we were going to do this. Patricia knew. He knew. It’s my fault I didn’t react well.”

 

“You don’t think you reacted well?”

 

She inhales and looks up at the stars. That’s her tell for when she misses him. No one else knows that, but Jaz does. She looks skyward and imagines he is too.

 

“Actually, I probably should give myself more credit. I didn’t react poorly. This would be easier if I had,” she sighs, “we talked about it. We made plans for his move to SWCS.”

 

“So he’s here? At Fort Bragg?”

 

Jaz nods.

 

“Does he know you’re here?”

 

“He might. I didn’t tell the guys not to tell him. Patricia probably told him. But we left it up to me. He said the decision was mine.”

 

“To do what?”

 

“To come home to him or not.”

 

***

 

Xander doesn’t solve Jaz’s problem and part of her is angry it couldn’t be that straight forward.

 

He did say to her as he left, “I’m proud of you,” and if she didn’t tremble once he was gone she might have been grateful for the compliment. But he didn’t fix it. These feelings still press on her chest.

 

_God, she misses him._

 

The ache is palatable. She felt it every time their new CO did something she couldn’t see him doing; her treacherous brain snaked the thought in, _if only he was here…_ and then she remembers it’s because of her, of them, and them is a question mark right now so what the hell was the point in the first place?

 

And every night during her damn deployment she felt it too, in the quonset hut, when she knew Amir was on the phone with Hannah back in Germany, and she wanted that. She wanted to fall asleep with his voice in her ear. She wanted to hear about his first days at SWCS, how it felt to work in an office, what it meant to be training the next generation of special operations men and women. She wanted to complain about the changes on her team and plan their next RV road tripand have phone sex.

 

More than anything, though, she wants to know he’s happy.

 

_But she loves her job too._

 

The adrenaline rush of the field Jaz knows well, and that is still there. But so is that deep satisfaction she feels when they save a life, and the past year has opened her up to processing the lost missions in a healthier way too. She still wears her emotions right there on the surface; her new CO snaps at her for it from time to time. He doesn’t have the same way of coming to her and letting her know she’s not the only one. She feels no compunction to confess herself to him. She’s got her guys for that, and that is part of what makes things hard. She loves serving with Amir and McG and she doesn’t want that to just end.

 

And then there’s Leah. Not really just Leah, but Leah does drive home the feeling Jaz has about her job in a particular way that feels tangible. Like if she walked away from her job, she’d loose this part of who she is.

 

Sophie Dalton had called Jaz once she was back in Turkey.

 

“I’m her mom, but we’re so different and I can’t give her what she needs,” Sophie said, “I look at the world and figure out how to fit in. She looks and she sees a fight for who she is.”

 

“Okay,” Jaz says without reservation.

 

They arrange for Leah and Jaz to catch up on Sunday nights via video chat. It’s a bit awkward at first because Leah wants to only talk about her uncle; Sophie must not have told Leah he and Jaz broke up.

 

But within a few weeks Leah moves on to other topics. She asks Jaz about her choice to join the army. What does she like about being a sniper? Leah talks about softball and how annoying her sisters are and how her friends treat her now that she’s “gone through a tragedy.”

 

_“What they don’t know,” Leah confessed, “is it was scary, but it wasn’t, like, hard. My dad is hard. My mom too. Not fitting in. Surviving in the woods for a week with a broken leg was scary, but it wasn’t, like, hard.”_

 

_“What makes us vulnerable is invisible to almost everyone,” Jaz said. She leaned her chin on her palm and heard her own words. How truly they described her. People thought being deployed, missing your family, was the hard part. Or running toward danger rather than away from it._

 

_Then Leah told her her friends keep saying “I can’t imagine” and that pissed her off because it’s not hard._

 

_“There was a bear and some trees and I was hungry and my leg hurt,” she said, “but no one says that about the fact that my dad is an asshole, but I think I’m more like him than I am my mom. And that scares me.”_

 

_That’s the part that is hard, Jaz told Leah, when you feel two diametrically opposed things equally. You love a man and your job. You hate how your father is and see the parts of yourself you inherited from him and like those things about yourself._

 

_“The hard things,” Jaz said, “make us feel exposed. Out of control. It’s probably a good thing not everyone can see them. But those who do - who see us - they are the ones who matter.”_

 

_Of course she thought of him when she said the words, but then Leah started to cry and Jaz leaned as close as she could to the computer screen._

 

_“Talk to me,” she said._

 

_“I don’t know…it’s stupid.”_

 

_Jaz waited. She learned that from him too._

 

_Finally Leah says the words aloud, “I might be gay. Or bi. I don’t know, but like if I don’t know what does that say about me?”_

 

_“Okay.”_

 

_The young woman looked at Jaz with a guarded breath. “Okay?”_

 

_“Okay,” Jaz said, “you’re certainly not the first or the last to not be immediately sure of something that important to who you are. Figuring things out, especially the things that matter the most, take time. They should take time when they’re important.”_

 

_***_

 

In the end it isn’t her guys that have the answer.

 

It’s her alone in that damned RV, dancing to _Conga_ by Gloria Estefan _(thank you, Elijah)_ , and making pasta from scratch just miles from _him_ , at an RV park that feels like a self-imposed purgatory. She’s just a few miles away and she’s making _pasta_ , dancing barefoot in her kitchen, both loving her life and avoiding it at the same time. She moves her hips to the Latin beat and of course she thinks of that night over a year ago when she dragged him to that gay salsa club and he _pressed_ her up against that door and kissed her. That night had felt complicated when now it feels easy. That’d been before the call that Leah was missing, before she faced his family, and he faced her fears about not having one.

 

In the year since then, Jaz has come to trust the truth that she has a family. She has people who love her and who rely on her. They invite her to come home with them and she’s grown into a person for whom that doesn’t feel like a pity invitation, but rather she accepts they truly like her. They love her. She thinks of what she told him that night she came home to him, when she’d been wrapped up in his arms, naked and wanting, for the first time, and there’d been one last thing to confess between them.

 

_“It wasn’t until the last few weeks that I wanted an us that included me. The everyday me.”_

 

It’s that - making peace with the everyday her - that allows Jaz to dance to _Conga_ in her kitchen while tears prick the corners of her eyes. She likes who she is, but that hasn’t brought a perfectly happy ending to her life. She doesn’t have everything figured out. She thinks about her conversation with Leah, about holding diametrically opposed feelings within the same heart, and what Preach said about that being a sign she’s doing something right.

 

It still doesn’t _feel_ good. There in the kitchen, alone, or at best kept company by Elijah’s ghost, Jaz says the truth aloud:

 

“I made the choice,” she says. She holds a palm to her stomach and feels herself breath in and out. The Latin beat thrums through her and she trembles to it. “It was my choice. He never asked me to choose between him or my job. I did.”

 

That’s the terrible truth and it happened there in Colorado, after they slept under the stars, naked and satiated, and Jaz awoke to realize that was the day they had to head east again, toward his new job and her job that would separate them for months. It would put their lives into a holding pattern. Hell, her home was an RV. It was a monstrosity on wheels, never meant to be permanent. An RV was defined by its lack of roots, and in that morning it sunk into Jaz’s bones that her team was equally impermanent. Preach was going to stay with his family in Southern California. Amir was half-way out the door once he put that ring on Hannah’s finger; he was CIA after all so their team for him was just a waylay in a much longer career. McG was the only one like her, and that isn’t enough to build a life around.

 

Should she choose to stay? Commit to building what comes after like he is? But then the panic built in her chest and she held the vase in her hands sitting on the bank of that river next to him.

 

“My job. It’s who I am. I can’t walk away. I’ve worked too long, too hard,” she turned the vase over in her hands, “but I don’t want to leave this behind. Remember that day in Apalacicola? How you said you don’t buy books because you can’t take them with you on deployment so what’s the point? And I don’t get to have you with me anymore. We’re not going to ever be together in the field again, and I feel like I’m leaving the best part of me behind. I don’t want that either. Part of me wants to just stay. Stay and build something with you. To live the kind of life we’ve dedicated ourselves to protecting for everyone else. With you, domestic sounds good.”

 

He pointed out to her the years he had to make his mark in the field, and the peace he felt in transitioning to this new place was the result of those years. She wasn’t wrong to feel like there was more for her to do out there in the field. That her desire to prove herself meant she didn’t love him enough. She listened to him and cried because it felt so rare to love someone who didn’t think her crisis of faith was about him.

 

And that’s why they broke up. Because Jaz asked for it. He said he’d happily wait and she confessed she couldn’t handle the in-between.

 

“Everything about me is impermanent,” she’d said when he took her to the airport for her flight to Turkey, “I need to figure that out.”

 

He kissed her then and she felt the undertow of desperation, as if he were trying to memorize _them_ , and she gave him everything she had. She let him pull her so close it hurt. She didn’t stop his tears when they slipped through her fingers. She held his gaze as he soaked her up.

 

“I love you,” he said.

 

“I love you.”

 

_“Go find out - what is it you want?”_

 

That’s what Adam Dalton had asked her, and it had been without preamble or persuasion.

 

That was the decision she had to make on her own. Without him. Without her guys.

 

That’s what Jaz names aloud in her RV that morning listening to _Conga_. No one is able to do this for her.

 

The pasta dough dries on the counter and Jaz sinks down to her knees on her kitchen floor. Her hair falls in her face because she’s cut it short enough that not all of it goes back in a pony tail anymore, and she hates the inconvenience while also liking the way the shorter cut emphasizes her cheekbones. It’s _both/and_ just like every other part of her life. But then there’s that Latin rhythm and the song with its chorus:

 

“ _I know you can’t control yourself any longer/ Feel the rhythm of the music getting stronger…”_

 

That’s the danger of leave:the music of it is impossible to ignore- the rhythm of daily living, of hobbies and homes - juxtaposes the life of the brave.

 

Both are good. Both are true.

 

On that day in the quonset hut with Xander more than a year ago when Jaz said _my guys,_ she vocalized something elemental. Today, she does it again. She says it aloud because being in control has become too costly. It’s costing her Adam, and more than that herself. Back then her loneliness caused her to name her guys aloud to Xander. The events in Tehran exposed the truth she’d kept unbidden - that she had people - and by naming that aloud she had to make peace with herself as someone who belonged to other people.

 

It was as if unnamed, truth is untouchable, but once you give it voice you grant it shape and weight. It becomes particular: Amir, Preach, McG, and then Hannah, Patricia, Sophie Dalton, Leah Dalton - and always it bent back around to Adam.

 

In the end, it comes down to Jaz alone in her home, with the ghost of her best friend echoing in her head, his last words to her: _buy the damn vase, believe you deserve it, and live a little extra for me._

 

But even Elijah can’t answer the question for her. All he can do is be the first person to give her a home.

 

The rest is up to her.

 

So Jaz dares to voice it aloud, to give her truth weight, shape, and _flesh_ despite not knowing what comes next.

 

“What do I want?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to Google, "'Bil tawfiq" translates to "with success" as a way of saying good luck. If you speak Arabic, please feel free to correct me.
> 
> Fab5, as always, all the love.
> 
> You can find me at kyrieanne on Tumblr and kyrieanneflails on Twitter.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go!

 

_a year ago_

After Jaz Kahn, Adam Dalton dates a woman named Carol and she is everything Jaz isn’t – effusive, blond, and quintessential. She isn’t military, but like everyone in town she is Fort Bragg adjacent – an elementary school teacher at the school on base. They meet at a bar when Adam intervenes one night after a couple soldiers don’t like to told she isn’t interested in them; he stays because, well, it’d been three months since his team left and Jaz with them. He is damn lonely.

Carol is from North Carolina; she wears bright pastel shift dresses that Sophie later tells Adam are Lily Pulitzer’s but he never really understands what that means. Carol can peel an apple in one long strip and she isn’t good at sitting still. She fills up his free-time with her friends and weekends spent hiking, tailgating football games at her alma matter, and prepping craft projects for her students.

One weekend Carol takes Adam to an island off the North Carolina shore where wild horses run; they don’t stay to camp under the stars like she planned because Adam just can’t do that. He can’t lie under the sky and hold another woman. He doesn’t feel guilty being with Carol; Jaz told him not to wait for her. She hadn’t wanted promises between them.

Yet, there is still a hope there in his veins, lingering and wanting, that can’t let go of _maybe_ ; maybe she will come back to him. Adam knows it’s not fair to Carol, who is kind and happy and from the way she looks at him Adam knows she’s in love with what they have. She whispers as much it into his neck one night as they fall asleep. Her sweet voice it breathy, laced with sleep, and Adam doubts she even realizes she’s said it aloud. As her breath evens out, Adam stares up at the whirring ceiling fan and a treacherous thought snakes its way around his heart.

Carol is everything Jaz isn’t, but she isn’t Jaz either. That’s the problem.

***

The noise Sophie make when Adam tells her about Carol is reminiscent of a dying animal.

“Don’t start,” he says.

She recovers and Adam can practically hear her shake her hair and see her straighten her spine through the phone; it’s what they have in common:  their ability to adapt and maintain their persona.

“Is she nice?”

“Don’t pretend you care if she’s nice,” Adam says.

“You’re my brother. Of course, I want her to be nice.”

“Jaz isn’t _nice_ ,” he says. No, she’s a million other things: intense, snarky, loyal, brave, kind, and so damn stubborn it makes his heart staccato, but Jaz Kahn isn’t nice.

“Jaz is her own category,” Sophie says quickly as if that’s all to say on the matter. His sister asks about Carol and Adam finds himself swallowing hard because he’d rather argue about his ex-girlfriend. On the surface, his sister asks the expected questions about a new significant other, but between her questions, in what isn’t said, he can practically hear Sophie shout her opinion that Adam is an idiot for not waiting.

Then at the end of the conversation there is a lull and Adam braces himself for his sister to echo everything that keeps him awake at night. That he isn’t being fair to Carol; that if he really loves Jaz Kahn he’d be able to wait a year on a borrowed hope she’ll find her way back to him. That he made a mistake transitioning to Swick. That life outside of being the field was drained of a color Adam can’t name. Carol’s life is full and happy and she’s welcomed him into it with an honest love that he should be grateful for.

But then he actually hears what Sophie is saying to him. Leah talks to Jaz once a week; she set it up to give Leah someone to confide in who Sophie trusts.

“They’re alike,” Sophie says, “it’s them versus the world; I figure out how to fit in. I don’t want my daughter to feel like my way is better, truer.”

Adam swallows, “How is she?”

“I’m not going to do this, be a go-between.” Sophie says, “I did that with you and Faith this summer and I did it when I talked to Jaz in D.C. This time, if you want to fix something, Adam, do it yourself.”

“Then why tell me?”

“Because you’re my brother and I wanted to be honest with you.”

There’s a silence between them. Adam runs a hand over his face.

“Carol’s nice.”

“Yeah, you said that.” Sophie’s voice is gentle.

“I had to let her go,” he whispers. For the first time in a long time Adam wishes he hadn’t grown up too soon; that there was someone he could call and just say, tell me how to fix it. “Loving her means I don’t get to try to change her; make her convenient to my life.”

“I know.”

“But?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Life has to keep going, Soph. I had to let her go and now I’m stuck with whatever the hell comes next.”

“Adam, be honest with yourself. You haven’t let her go.”

***

There are a lot of hours in a day, week, and month during which Adam Dalton doesn’t think about Jaz Kahn. Most of that time is spent at SWCS, or as everyone actually calls it, Swick. The nickname Top proves to be true in this new place where his role is to train and teach the next generation of men and women special forces. It is good, soul-satisfying work and at the end of the day Adam gets to go home to Patton and the little house he has on base.

It’s a good life. One that makes his sisters happy because if he was never going to move back home at least he is stateside, relatively safe, and in the same time zone. Adam spends more time with his nieces than he ever has before. He steals weekends away from Carol to go up to Carlisle and the cabin with his family. He takes Leah skeet shooting and it’s awkward how they both talk around her; Adam has too much pride to fish for information from his niece. At dinner, Sophie asks after Carol and all eyes turn to Adam. His younger nieces don’t understand the undercurrent between Adam and his sister, but Leah’s eyes narrow and he swears mother and daughter are tag teaming him.

Then, after dinner, Leah siddles up to him as Adam dunks dishes into soapy water.

“I won’t tell her about Carla.”

“Her name is Carol.”

Leah fixes on him that thirteen year-old girl stare of _and why should I care?_ Adam tips his head to warn her from being rude, but she just pats him on the chest and says, “She doesn’t need to know about Charlotte just like you don’t need to know about Steve.”

Adam is left standing there dripping suds onto the floor.

***

Jaz has been gone nine months when Carol brings up moving in together. Adam breaks down and calls Preach. The two men have talked sporadically over the intervening months via text so when Adam calls his friend there is surprise in the other man’s voice when he answers.

“What happened?”

Adam might have had more whiskey than he intended so he forgoes any preamble.

“Was it obvious, Jaz and me, to you?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Because you were each other’s home; when she is around you stopped thinking like a soldier and let yourself be a person.”

Adam thinks of the RV and those long summer days he spent with her, fixing it, forming morning and evening routines, and the way at night before he fell asleep he would flex his hand over the blankets and feel something effortless about falling asleep. Those days – they had been his version of a good life.

“Adam,” Preach says, “you do the same for her. You make her able to trust that she has a home.”

“What do I do?”

Preach doesn’t know about Carol; Adam couldn’t bring himself to tell even Patricia. He doesn’t care to dissect why. So when his friend’s advice echoes Sophie’s, Adam is wise enough to listen.

“I’d start by being honest with yourself. You need her more than you need any one. Even the army. Tactically, what does that mean?”

***

Adam breaks up with Carol on a Sunday. It’s raining and she shows up at his place with a lasagna for them and for Patton one of those gourmet dog biscuits from a store in Fayetteville run by hipsters. Patton makes a quick exit with his biscuit as if he knows what is about to happen. Carol kisses him and Adam freezes. He puts his hands on her shoulders and steps back.

“What?” She wrinkles her nose and smiles at the same time, beaming up at him.

But then her eyes take in how his lips are thinned and Adam sees her swallow. It hurts his heart. His hands drop by his side and Carol hugs her arms around her waist.

“This isn’t working, is it? For you, I mean.”

Adam exhales, “You don’t have to be brave. Saying the words for me.”

Her nostrils flare, “Don’t do that. Don’t act all kind and gentle when you’re breaking up with me. At least have the decency to be a bit of an ass about it. Sheepish at the very least.”

It’s a traitorous thought, but Adam can’t help but think that this version of Carol – angry and harsh – is the only version Jaz would have liked. If Jaz were a spectator in this she’d be rooting for this Carol. So he gives Carol what she needs to be angry. He tells her he’s been in love with someone else, that she was the rebound that he didn’t plan to linger for this long, and then he says thank you. Thank you for helping him realize how he truly felt. About another woman

 “Fuck you, Adam Dalton,” the woman who isn’t Jaz Kahn trembles.

She is everything Jaz isn’t – effusive with a happiness that is right there on the surface, a Southern blonde who wasn’t scarred from tours in foreign places and friends dying in her arms, and quintessentially not what Adam wants. The shame he feels is real as she gasps, panic slicing through her.

“I saw myself marrying you.”

“I’m sorry I let this go that far.”

Then Carol realizes something, “Whoever she is – she deserves better than what you just did to me.”

“You do too.”

“I know,” she snaps.

 _Gosh, he likes her_ , Adam thinks. He’s just not in love with her.

And for that reason a part of him is angry at Jaz. Or angry that loving her has dragged him here. It’s all messy and muddled together; standing there in front of Carol and her tears and his shame he realizes that’d been the tactical error he made.

He expected that the woman he loves could walk away and he would calmly, rationally move on. He kept telling himself he did the right thing. And he had. Adam stands by what he told Jaz in the airport. _Go find out what you want_. He knows that her need to go wasn’t a reflection of her love for him. He feels that surety in his marrow just like he knows he hadn’t “let her go” because Jaz Kahn isn’t going to be pinned down by anyone, even him. Adam can know all of this, feel it echo in the chambers of his heart at night when he is inexplicably awake, and still be unbelievably dense.

What happened between them – broke his heart – just as he was breaking Carol’s now.

 

_now_

 

Adam lets himself mark the date Jaz Kahn is due stateside in his Google calendar with a single * as the event title. He doesn’t really need to mark it; the date is pressed into his brain.

As months turn into weeks he finds himself flipping forward in the paper calendar he uses for work, but he won’t let himself mark it on paper. There is something less permanent about the digital * hanging there on the next month like a star in the night sky. If it’s the right one you can find your way home by it.

The date approaches and Adam calls Sophie to ask if she’ll put Leah on the train to come see him; she refuses.

“You’re not using my daughter as a buffer between you and Jaz.”

Adam scrubs a hand over his face. “I was going more for a distraction. I thought I’d take her up to Asheville. Do some hiking. Get my mind off the fact that my whole team is home and I can’t call any of them. They’re her family.”

“Shit, you don’t know?” Sophie breathes.

“Know what?” His sister stammers and Adam inhales, “Sophie, what do I not know?”

“She’s coming home to you. To North Carolina at least. She had the RV moved there the week after she was deployed. It’s in storage in Fayetteville. She’s catching a military transport to Fort Bragg alone. Why would she do that if it isn’t to see you?”

***

The day of Jaz’s expected arrival stateside, Adam gets his hair cut and cleans his tiny house. He spends ten minutes standing in front of his linen closet holding fresh sheets in hand. It was presumptuous to think she wanted _them_ back. It was dangerous to think they’d fall into bed together as if the last year hadn’t happened. In the end, he changes the sheets and tells himself they needed to be done anyway.

 

As he moves through his day, he makes a mental list of the questions he wants to ask:  The deployment, how was it? Tell me about Amir and McG? Preach tell you he’s the president of the PTA? Are you happy? Do I still get to be the first person to know if you are? He wants to know if she still uses that lemon and lavender salve on her hands. Had she spent the past year cooking with Amir, side by side in a makeshift Quonset hut kitchen?

 

Adam smiles at the image, but then he remembers the team moved to Europe. When he’s allowed himself to imagine he’s always put her back in Incirlik, surrounded by the few people who Adam trusts to be her family. But like every other part of _them,_ time has worn away what was, even in his day dreams.

 

He doesn’t the sleep that night and when the notification from his Google calendar pings in the morning to remind him of his scheduled event titled, *, Adam has to put the phone down. He leans palms flat on the counter and closes his eyes. The anger is there in his gut. It sits like day-old oatmeal congealed to the bowl.

 

He recalls then what Xander told him all those years ago, about how Adam would never be able to drill the hard emotions out of himself, so he had to find ways to let it share his headspace with the parts of living that felt good. Flirt with a pretty girl. Laugh. Spend time with your friends. He thinks of Carol and part of him wants to say to the Xander in his mind, _look see I tried that!_

 

But that Xander remains infuriatingly calm. He tells Adam the point isn’t to accomplish a mission; it’s to find a way to balance it all rather than compartmentalize the inconvenient. It’s humbling, he thinks, that all these years later he’s still learning that same lesson. It’s the mistake he made when Jaz left; it’d hurt Carol. Adam bends his head and makes a promise to no one but himself that this time he’ll do better.

 

***

 

The * day comes and goes without any word or sign from Jaz.

 

Adam tells himself she needs time to orient herself. When the second day comes and still nothing – Adam tells himself it’s the time zone change. She’ll make contact once she’s recovered.

 

But the days become a week and Adam is exhausted from waiting. It’s terrible to do nothing when it feels like his inaction might be worse. There’s the memory of their fight over this very issue during their mission in Zagreb to rescue Cassie Connor. If he wasn’t so damn agitated, Adam might have found the irony humorous.

 

Instead, he wants to let that flame of hope Sophie stoked when she said Jaz was flying back to _him_ – he wants to snuff it out. He wishes he’d never put that damn * on his calendar, and he’d give anything to stop inhaling every time his phone rings.

 

That night he strips his bed of the sheets he’d carefully changed a week ago. He sleeps on his couch, and he stares at the ceiling fan circling round and round. He tries not to think it feels a lot like his life.

 

***

 

There’s a knock at his office door and Adam has the stray thought that it sounds like his own -  a palm flat against the frame. He answers without thinking. The door swings open and Adam finishes the sentence in the email he’s writing before looking up.

 

“Hi, Adam.”

 

In the end, she took her own time coming to him. Of course she did. Her voice hasn’t changed. It’s still gravelly and he likes being one of the few people to know it sounds even more so when she first wakes up. Adam’s head whips up, and he can count this moment as one of the few in his life in which he’s been truly surprised.

 

Jaz is there in his doorway. Her hands are stuffed into her jean pockets and her skin is the same golden brown against the black tank top she wears. What’s different is her hair. It skims her collar bone and Adam likes it immediately.

 

She rocks on her heels. “I was wondering…do you want to take a road trip?”

 

“Yes.” He chokes a bit when he remembers to breathe again.

 

Her face breaks out into a grin. Then he’s crosses the room and stands there just an arm’s length from her. They both exhale.

 

“Hi,” he says.

 

She bites her lip. “Hi.”

 

They move at the same time – his arms envelope her and hers anchor around his waist. She still fits into the curve of him. When she turns her head and buries her nose into that spot that’s always belonged to her, the indentation of his breastbone, Adam closes his eyes and is grateful for * and how the right one always points to home.

 

***

 

There is so much to say, so much to talk through, that they actually say very little besides the basic small talk. Neither is in a rush. She has an appointment at the dealership that’s working on the rig and it is the middle of Adam’s work day. They agree to meet at his place for dinner. After the door clicks shut again he calls Sophie.

 

“You know,” she says a few minutes into the conversation, “talking to your sister about your love life is kinda pathetic.”

 

“She didn’t say she still loves me.”

 

Sophie makes a _phish_ sound.

 

“Any suggestions for what I should make for dinner?”

 

“Nothing. Stick to your strengths. Pick up barbeque and a good wine. Try not to overthink it. Remember the last time you thought your relationship with Jaz needed a plan?”

 

He tries to do just that as he hovers between the kitchen and living room unsure of how to fill the minutes until she arrives. He’s lighting the only candle he owns – something that Carol bought him months ago that smells like sandlewood – like a damn fool when she knocks. He wipes his hands on his jeans before opening the door.

 

“I like the flowers,” Jaz says as she steps inside. She jerks a thumb over her shoulder toward the potted flowers on his stoop. Another thing Carol added at some point. Adam has managed to keep them alive out of guilt.

 

Jaz exhales as she takes in his living room. The furniture is a matching set Sophie ordered for him because she said his taste ran too cabin-esque.

 

“Sophie did this, didn’t she?” Jaz murmurs and Adam laughs.

 

It breaks the tension and things _almost_ feel normal as he gives her the short tour and explains the two kinds of North Carolina barbeque she’s in for. Back in the kitchen, Adam’s heart squeezes when she hops onto the counter while he opens the bottle of wine. She takes the glass from him and he smiles at the sound of her heels knocking against his cabinets. With plates piled high with barbeque and sides, Adam leads them into the living room. They opt for the couch because he has never bothered with a dining table. It’d been on Carol’s calendar for them to go to Thomasville to buy one.

 

Jaz sits with her legs folded under her. Adam finds his eyes straying for the way her tank top shows off her arms, which are graceful and strong from months of work.

 

“You’re staring,” she teases.

 

“I just can’t believe you’re here. On my couch. After all this time.”

 

She drains her wine glass as if fortifying herself, and then, “Are we ready to do this? To really talk?”

 

“I am if you are.”

 

She inhales through her nose. “I am.”

 

“Do you want to start or should I?”

 

“You.”

 

Adam realizes in that instant that despite all the waiting and day dreaming he hasn’t decided what he wants to say now that the moment is here. He goes with the truth, plain and simple.  


“I’m in this if you’re still interested.”

 

The words feel small compared to what he means, but he holds his breath because they feel dangerous enough.

 

“I am,” she offers a smile, “interested, I mean.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah,” and this time her smile widens.

 

Adam refills both of their glasses, “Okay, then what happens next?”

 

***

She was serious about that road trip.

 

“I think we have some stuff to work out. To see if this is doable. And that’s gonna take some time. Why not see the sights while we do?” She says that first night.

 

Of course, Adam can’t just take off this time; he’s not on leave like Jaz. It takes a week to clear the vacation time and reassign his essential duties. Jaz drops by his office for lunch each day and Adam knows his co-workers are curious. They’d never met Carol and he’d never thought to put a photo of her up in his office. There is, however, one of their team sitting on the cabinet behind his desk. The second time Jaz comes by with lunch, his assistant observes, “She makes you smile more. We like that.”

 

“I do too,” he says because it’s true.

 

They are picking up groceries at Publix for dinner when Adam brings up the last thing keeping him from leaving town.

 

“I need someone to watch Patton. He’s too old to be climbing in and out of the rig. Arthritis.”

He says.

 

They’re standing over cuts of sirloin and Adam pretends to be debating on which to get.

 

Jaz puts her chin on his shoulder, “Can you call a friend?”

 

“The person who’d Patton do best with….um, I can’t exactly ask this particular favor from.”

 

Jaz smiles, “Adam, what’s her name?”

 

So in the meat section at Publix, Adam tells Jaz about Carol. They stand there for a long time because the story spills out in jumbled pieces. Adam stuffs his hands into his pockets and when he finally reaches the end – that rainy Sunday two months ago – he’s looking at the tile floor. He misses her stepping into his personal space and looping her arms around his waist until she is there.

 

Adam leans into her. “Leah said you had a Steve.” He nudges her shoulder with his own, “It’d make me feel a hell of a lot better if that were true, but she was making it up to make me jealous, wasn’t she?”

 

“She was. And she did that entirely on her own.”

 

“So there was no one this whole time?”

 

Jaz shakes her head, “I was a little busy. Saving lives and taking down bad guys.”

 

Adam tightens his hold on her. “I’m sorry.”

 

“For what?”

 

“I don’t know exactly. To you and her. You both deserved more from me.”

 

Jaz stands up on her tip toes to press a kiss to his cheek. It’s chaste and quick. But still, it is their first since she came back and Adam’s heart skips a beat.

 

“You’ve never let me down, Adam, and that remains as true today as it was when I left you at that airport.”

 

Then she takes his hand in her own, and Adam doesn’t let go all the way home.

 

***

 

He decides not to ask Carol or any of the few friends he has that were first her’s. Instead, he calls his assistant and while it is awkward the woman is more than happy to take Patton. Adam offers to pay her and she turns him down.

 

“What are friends for?” she says when she and her boyfriend come to pick the old guy up.

 

Jaz is there and she elbows Adam. “And you thought you didn’t have any friends here,” she says as they pull away.

 

Patton watches them through the rear window and Adam’s throat is tight. He makes a silent promise to the pup that when he comes back it won’t be alone. After they close up the house and load his two suitcases into her rental car, Jaz hovers in the driveway.

 

“Will a neighbor water your flowers for you?” She taps her foot against the potted plants Carol put on his front steps.

 

“I don’t know any of them,” he shrugs. “It’s not the end of the world if they die.”

 

Jaz makes a non-committal sound Adam doesn’t understand, but climbs into the car and he follows. He finds her free hand and wraps his around it while they drive. There is so much about this trip that is undefined:  their destination, days gone, and what exactly they have to work out. It’s a lot like their last trip, the one after Jaz came back to him in Tallahassee. It’s their pattern, he thinks, her leaving and returning. Maybe that is what they need to figure out. That and their careers and really their entire lives because if one thing between them is clearly defined, at least for him, is she’s it for him.

 

Adam hasn’t been to the rig since Jaz showed back up in his life. She’d always come to his place or they’d done something around town. Still, at the end of every day she’d driven back to her campsite and slept in her own traveling home. The line between them had been neatly and clearly drawn so when she pulls up to the tiny campsite where her rig is parked Adam’s throat tightens. Despite living in tight quarters with Jaz most of the time he’s known her, this feels different. It feels intimate.

 

“This place makes Ivan’s look like Disney Land,” Adam jokes to cover up his nervousness.

 

Jaz slings his backpack over her shoulder as he wrestles the two suitcases out of the trunk. She’d made fun of him when she came to pick him up. Said life stateside had made him go soft, needing so much stuff for just a few weeks.

 

“Cause we literally have no idea where we’re going,” he’d muttered and she’d thrown her head back and laughed.

 

Now, as he hauls the suitcases into the rig, Adam feels ridiculous. He drops his stuff and looks around at the familiar interior. It’s the same and different at the same time. His acrylic framed photos are still up, but she’s added a few prints she’s picked up. He recognizes the Turkish sunset and there’s one of Paris at sunset, when the city is all blush and golden. She mentioned a girl’s trip with Patricia and Hannah during one of their off weekends to the city; he imagines she bought it then.

 

There is an essential oils diffuser on the counter. The one heavy indulgence Jaz allows herself – a cast iron skillet – still sits on the stovetop. Adam bought it for her in a fancy kitchen store in New Orleans. Now there is a gorgeous patina to it that he knows Jaz is damn proud of. She’s changed the throw blanket on the couch and a dozen other small things that make the rig feel even more lived in than before.

 

“I got a new tire pressure monitoring system,” Jaz says as she comes inside behind him. “And a keyless entry lock. They both let you control everything with your phone. I’ll download the apps to yours later.”

 

She takes his backpack and dumps it on her bed and then turns to him with her hands on her hips. Adam stands there dumbfounded. He assumed he’d be sleeping in the loft bed above the driver’s seat like he had the first time he stayed in the RV.

 

“Adam?”

 

“Um, there’s no way for this not to be awkward, but where am I sleeping?” He gestures between the two ends of the RV.

 

If she feels awkward, Jaz gives no sign of it. She opens the fridge and digs around inside.

 

“We both know you’ll end up in my bed eventually so I figured why not save ourselves the work of pretending otherwise?”

 

Her back is to him when she says it and for that Adam is glad. She’d never have let him live down the shock he’s sure is evident on his face. Jaz closes the fridge door and slaps a bottle of water against his chest. He takes it automatically.

 

“Hurry up and unpack. We’ve got to decide where the hell we’re going.”

 

Their military training drummed neatness into both of them so unpacking his suitcases is quick work. He hangs up his clothes next to Jaz’s in the tiny closet and steals a look at the sundresses lined up. He loves her in fatigues and pretty much any damn thing, but he will always have a soft spot for Jaz Kahn in a cotton sundress, tanned skin, and a flash of red paint on her toes. She’s left half the drawers for him and the spot next to her toiletries case for his. He packs the suitcases away like Russian nesting dolls and stores them in the rig’s basement. When he comes back inside, Jaz is bent over a paper map of the United States.

 

Adam slides into the dinette booth opposite her and takes in the routes she’s sketched out in colored pencil. He finds their original route:  west from the Florida panhandle, through the gulf coast to New Orleans, then to Texas, and then the desert southwest:  the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and Santa Fe, until finally pointing north as they made their way up the Big Sur highway and to the Northern California redwoods. Jaz’s finger taps where they sit now in North Carolina.

 

“We could do the Blue Ridge Parkway,” she muses, “that’s close if you don’t want to be gone too long.”

 

“I’ve got three weeks and could put in for more if I wanted.”

 

She grins at him, “Good.”

 

“What do you want to see?”

 

She’s sketched out routes that take them up and down the eastern coast, through the Great Lakes, and a great Western route that loops through Yellowstone, the Rockies, and finally lumbers into the Pacific Northwest. It’s summer so they can pretty much go anywhere comfortably thanks to Elijah’s souped up monstrosity on wheels. Adam watches her hands skim each route as she thinks.

 

Jaz’s eyes are large when she finally looks up, “Honestly?”

 

“Honestly.”

 

“Anywhere new. With you, I want to make new memories. Ones neither of us have ever had before.”

 

So that first night they make homemade pizza over the campfire and each make a list of US places they haven’t been but are interested in visiting. His are:  Savannah, Maine, and Yellowstone. Hers are:  Chicago, Seattle, and Rocky Mountain National Park.

Adam skims her list, “Does it count having visited there once if it was only a layover for a flight and I never left the airport?”

 

“O’Hare?”

 

“Yeah. It was for a conference.”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Then it looks like we have our route. We’ll head up to Maine, then across to Chicago, the Rockies and Yellowstone, over to Seattle, and then Savannah before coming back to Fort Bragg.” Adam sketches it out in a new colored pencil on the map. Jaz finishes off the pizza as he does.

 

“It is the least efficient, most contradictory route I’ve ever seen,” she laughs.

 

“Good,” Adam says as he hangs it up on the refrigerator with magnets bought along the route of their last trip. “We’re trying something new here.”

 

She says it softly, so soft he almost doesn’t hear her say it, “Yes we are.”

 

***

 

They leave that night because it’s 7,500 miles round trip. Jaz insists on taking the first shift and Adam keeps her company by planning what they’re going to do once they get to Portland, Maine.

 

“Basically, we’re going to eat our weight in lobster and clam chowder,” he says as he reserves online their spot at a KOA just outside the city.

 

“And look at boats,” Jaz laughs, “Oh, I mean the history of boats.”

 

“The Maine Maritime Museum has an exhibit on Bath Iron Works, which pretty much has built our Navy.” Adam huffs.

 

“Says the Army man.”

 

“Says the man who can appreciate good craftsmanship when he sees it.”

 

“Of course, you do, it has the word ship in it.”

 

The look Adam gives her only makes Jaz laugh harder.

 

After that, they take turns sleeping and driving the 13 hours it takes to get Portland so there’s no first night awkwardness about sharing a bed. Jaz nudges Adam awake when she stops to fill up with gas, and he stumbles to the coffee maker. When she comes inside and tucks her purse away, it occurs to Adam they hadn’t talked about splitting expenses.

 

“I’ll get the next tank,” he says.

 

“You don’t have to. It’s my rig, my road trip idea.”

She’s within an arm’s reach so Adam snags her hand in his, “But we’re doing it together.”

 

It’s a small gesture, but like all the other small gestures they keep making, each fortifies the other. Yes, this is real, they’re saying. It is comforting to Adam that she’s out there with him, teetering between the thrill of being together and terror of what remains undefined. He thinks about what Preach said to him three months ago on the phone: _You need her more than you need any one. Even the army. Tactically, what does that mean?_

That, he decides, is the point.

 

***

 

 

_Patricia,_

_Adam says you grew up in Portland, but I don’t believe him. I swear you said you grew up in L.A. so please help us settle this argument. He is unbelievably smug about it. I dragged him away from all the old ships long enough to take one that actually still works and tour the islands of Casco Bay. We ate the best meal I’ve ever had (don’t tell Amir) on Bailey and I pushed Adam into the ocean. Old man is getting unawares now that he’s not in the field. He dragged me in with him so don’t feel too bad for him._

_Jaz & Adam _

 

***

 

_Hannah & Amir, _

_Jaz says you two are on a love cruise for old people somewhere along the Rhine; we thought of you two when we took a ferry out onto Lake Michigan and watched fireworks off of Navy Pier. There was dancing, which I know Hannah would approve of, and a baseball game at Wrigley Field, which I know Amir has no appreciation for. Cricket cannot compete, my friend. I can’t wait to toast your engagement in person, my friends._

_Adam & Jaz_

 

***

 

Somewhere along I-80 on their way to Rocky Mountain National Park Jaz asks Adam if he’s happy.

 

He’s driving and she’s sorting Skittles into their preferred flavor groups:  red and purple for her, yellow and orange for him. They split the green ones down the middle.

 

“It’s hard not to be happy,” he says as he accepts a properly sorted Skittle mixture. The sourness of the lemon, orange, and whatever the green is supposed to be is perfection.

 

Adam nods his head toward her, the open road ahead of him, and his handful of Skittles before knocking them back. Jaz pushes her own red and purple skittles around on the dash.

 

“No, I mean in general. With the life you’ve got,” she says.

 

There’s a beat not because Adam doesn’t know the answer, but because saying it aloud feels like he’s exposing himself when all of his training had been to avoid that kind of risk.

 

In the first week of their trip, they’ve gotten good at those small gestures to remind one another they are doing this together:  crawling into the same bed each night, planning their days side by side over coffee, and sharing the costs of the trip. There’s an unspoken agreement that either can grab the other’s hand at any time to anchor them together. Jaz has filled him in on her time overseas and they’ve talked shop about her new CO. Adam recounted his challenges rotating out of the field, of both wanting and not wanting the domesticity that came with dating Carol. They Facetimed Leah together and when the girl squealed at the sight of the two of them in the same place, and when she asked if they were together Jaz answered in a happy voice “We’re on this trip together,” without any awkwardness.

 

It is everything that last summer was:  just the two of them happy together, trying new things, living and dwelling and being in the same space. Adam thinks of that night he took her dancing and kissed her hard against that door like they were teenagers. He remembers how that romper exposed skin on Jaz Kahn in a way he’d never seen before. Answering her question now is the same kind of tantalizing, but heart-pounding exposure. It makes him _want_ so badly not just her but all of _them_. So, he answers honestly despite the fear in him.

 

“Without you in it, no I’m not happy.”

 

“Adam.”

 

“You asked. I’m sorry if you don’t like the answer.”

 

It comes out harsher than he intended, but there’s that anger there in his gut. Adam flexes his hands on the wheel to keep it in check.

 

Jaz exhales. “Okay, I guess now is as good of time as any to talk about it.”

 

“Talk about what?”

 

“You’re angry at me.”

 

“No, I’m not.

 

She waits because, god bless her, she knows him.

 

There’s a beat and then Adam sighs, “I am and I hate that I am.”

 

Jaz turns in the passenger seat so her legs are hooked over the arm. All of her attention is on Adam. “I remember when Sophie came to see me in D.C. and she found out I was sending you those post cards she asked for a few days before I contacted you. She had something she wanted to say to you first.”

 

Adam huffs. “She tricked Faith and I into talking to each other at the cabin where she lectured us.”

 

Jaz tips her head, “She told you you’re not the total shit. That you’re brave and wonderful and awe-inspiring, but you can also be a dense mother fucker and selfish and even a bit irrational,” she says. “And that’s okay.”

 

“I don’t understand why I’m angry,” Adam confesses. “I shouldn’t be. Not at you leaving. I told you once I’d never be one of those guys who saw you as a woman before I saw you as a soldier. That hasn’t changed.”

 

“But it did make your life damn inconvenient,” she keeps her tone light, “once you got around to paying attention to the woman parts.”  


But he’s not in the mood to tease. “You know this isn’t just about sex for me.”

 

So Jaz arches an eyebrow, “Hence, why you’ve barely touched me since we left on this trip. You haven’t even used the we-cuddled-up-in-our-sleep excuse I practically handed you when I said let’s share a bed.”

 

Adam blinks, “Wait, are you mad at me for not making a move?”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“I was waiting for you to let me know it was wanted. That kind of intimacy.”

 

“I. Invited. You. Into. My. Bed.”

 

“You ordered me into your bed.”

 

“EVEN BETTER!”

 

Adam swore and then Jaz did too as he crossed three lanes of traffic to pull onto an off ramp.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“I can’t have this fight and drive at the same time so we’re stopping.”

 

“Or we can table the discussion, like rational adults. Not swerve off the road like a crazy-person.”

 

“Well, you say I have the right to be irrational from time to time. I’m playing that card.” Adam mutters as he pulls into the nearly abandoned rest stop. It’s almost midnight so the parking lot is quiet, but still he parks as far from the buildings as he can so the windshield faces a grove of pine trees.

 

As he turns off the engine, Adam ignores the O on Jaz’s face. He drops the keys on the driver’s seat and stalks toward the back of the rig. The problem with fighting in a motorhome? There’s not much room to go anywhere so it’s half a minute before he’s pacing back up to the front where Jaz is sitting on the dinette table instead of in the booth like a normal person would. She’s cross-legged and leaning back on her palms with a quirked eyebrow.

 

“Feel better, Top?”

 

The old nickname only irritates him more.

 

“Stop trying to goad me into saying it.”

 

“Say what?”

 

“That I’m mad because of who you are, that if you could be just a bit more conventional, more like…like…-,”

 

“Carol?”

 

“You said that, not me.”

 

“Still true.”

 

Adam pulls at his hair and wishes for a punching bag to take out the anger rising up in his veins.

 

“I’ve never wanted you to be anything but who you are.” He stops pacing and stands in front of Jaz, “I love _you_. The soldier you. The woman you. The _everyday_ you.”

 

Heat rises up in her cheeks at the memory of her confession the first time they made love. It’d been the last thing between them then, but one confession isn’t enough for an entire life time together. He looks at her now, perched on their dining table like a damn cat, blushing and challenging him at the same time and the breath goes out of him.

 

 _God, he loves her_ and on the same exhale _god, he’s scared she’s going to leave him again._

 

They just stare at one another and for a moment Adam is terrified he said that out loud, but then there is a THWACK as something hits the RV. Both of them jump into alert, defensive positions, scanning for what it was. Adam sees a flutter of wings and then another thwack, not as loud this time, and he sees it:  a pigeon had run right into the window behind Jaz. It hit the window again and then a fourth time before Jaz leans over the dinette and thwacks at the glass back. It scares the flustered pigeon enough that he flies away. Jaz climbs back up on the table and looks at Adam.

 

“Damn sky rats,” she mutters. Then she grins at him and Adam can’t help but grin back.

 

“How does it fly into a stationary RV in the dark?”

 

Jaz exhales, “It did manage to cut the tension.”

 

“I was thinking of that night when you came back to me and what you said.” Adam murmurs.

 

“So was I. I thought that I wouldn’t leave you again. That I’d figured everything out.” Jaz looks away from him. Adam’s fingers itch to tip her chin up, but he stays rooted to that spot as he looks at her.

 

Love is not an absolution from your personal messiness. It doesn’t go away from one confession. Epiphanies aren’t permanent. Adam thinks about the past couple years as he’s fallen slowly, awkwardly, and sometimes painfully in love not only with Jaz but in a healthier love for his family too. Love requires coming around to the same patterns, the same hurts, the same weaknesses, but doing so with the longest kind of gaze, a lifetime’s length.

 

That had been his tactical error:  loving in deployments and leaves.

 

The military may mark its time like that, but it wasn’t how life is lived. Adam thinks of his nieces; he may have stopped his life for the latest deployment, but life hadn’t stopped for him. They still grew and changed. He knew intellectually of course, but there’s a bodily form of knowing too. It’s when something so simple sinks down into your marrow that you can’t help but be changed by it.

 

To love Jaz Kahn isn’t just to love her weaknesses; it’s to trust that his weaknesses are loveable too. To let her love him. It’s all a jumbled mess in Adam’s head as he steps closer to Jaz.

 

He can hear his own boots on the floor and the quickening of her breath as he nears. Once he’s within arm’s length of her he hooks his hands beneath her knees. She inhales. Adam tugs gently and her legs unfold. He wraps them around his hips and pulls her tight against him so she’s barely on the table any more.

 

“I’m not angry at who you are or that you left,” he says as he leans his forehead against her own, “I’m just _angry_ and I’m so tired of being like this. It feels like I’ve been angry my whole life”

 

There it is - his confession to match her own.

 

Jaz takes his face in her hands and when Adam opens his eyes she holds his gaze steady and sure.

 

Her lips press a soft kiss to his cheek, “I’m sorry your dad was a shit,” another kiss to his brow, “and that Lily died and then your mom died.” They stay still for a very long time after she says that; their breath falls into sync.

 

Eventually, Jaz tilts her head and brushes her lips to his other cheek, “I’m sorry that you had to walk away from your sisters in order to help support them. That you’ve lost too many friends and taken lives in order to protect your country. I’m sorry I keep leaving you. That I needed another year out in the field to answer what I want.”

 

With each sorry she kisses him and for once in his life, Adam Dalton lets someone take care of him. It goes unsaid between them:  she isn’t saying sorry for all these things because she’s responsible. Jaz isn’t taking his burdens off him to lay them on herself. They have done the hard work not to fall into that pattern.

 

The life of the brave teaches you that some of the hardest parts of living are too big for any one person to absolve for. His father’s addiction, the tragedy of Lily’s death, and how it drained the life out of his mother – those things are just too big to stay angry about. Adam wants to live better than that. And the terrors of war: the glazed, empty stare of friends who have died right next to him, the missions where the bad guy won, and the missions where Adam very much doubted if they were the good guys – those things are just too big to think you are in control.

 

Jaz works her fingers along his jaw, through his beard, and frames his face. “Adam,” she says softly, “Look at me.”

 

Adam opens his eyes and realizes he’s crying.

 

“You have every reason to be angry,” she says with the ferocity he’s loved in her since the first day he watched her do drills. It’s an intensity that burns so hot he imagines the flame not as red, but blue. Jaz’s voice wavers on the next part, but her eyes stay fixed on him. “You have every reason to be angry and it hurts me to say that because it’s so damn true when all I want for you is happiness. Peace. Joy. All those dumb Hallmark words. I want them for you and dammit you know what happened when I finally asked myself what it is I wanted? When all the other voices couldn’t give me an answer. It was just me sitting on the floor of this rig with no one but me? You know what the answer was?”

 

Adam waits while Jaz evens her voice, taking a deep shuddering breath. He brushes back her tears with his thumbs and she does the same for him.  

 

“I want to stop running.” Her voice breaks, “Like you being angry – I do it and I don’t know why I do it. It started with Elijah; the man acted like it was his life’s goal to be my friend.”

 

“And then he died.”

 

“In my arms and all I could think was if only I’d run in first it’d had been me and world would still get him.”

 

She leans onto Adam’s shoulder and he picks her up. She goes with it, curling her arms and legs around him. He settles them onto the couch so that her knees straddled his own. It keeps her where he wanted her, close.

 

Jaz lifts her head, her eyes closed, and she sighs. “And then Iran happened.”

 

“I broke two fingers punching the steering wheel of that truck I was trying to hot wire. The one I sat in and watched you drive past me. If I hadn’t had the guys I don’t know what I’d have done.”

 

She finds the correct hand – Adam doesn’t know how she guesses correctly – and massages the fingers that he broke. “Preach said he made you one of his power shakes.”

 

Adam lifts a knee to nudge her to keep going.

 

“You made me talk to Xander and there was something about saying the words aloud. That my guys came and rescued me. That was the first time anyone ever had. The feelings weren’t new, but saying them made them more real and something began to change.”

 

“You asked Amir to teach you how to cook.”

 

Jaz laughs, “I remember you watching me, trying to figure out what was happening. But I didn’t want to talk to you about it. It felt to dangerous. Too intimate.”

 

“When you went dark after we got stateside I told myself the same thing,” Adam says, “that Patricia knew and you were safe. The rest wasn’t my business.”

 

“But you made it your business.” Jaz traces a finger along his collar bone and Adam tightens his hold on her.

 

“I did,” He kisses the underside of her jaw and is rewarded with a shiver down her spine. He can feel it under his palm. “And then you found Leah when no one else could.”

 

“She ran hoping someone would find her, prove that she wasn’t alone,” Jaz says, “Like understands like.”

 

“See running, it isn’t always a bad thing.”

 

Adam groans because Jaz is focused on his collarbones, tracing them with her quick fingers. It feels so damn good.

 

“No, but I don’t want a lifetime of it. Running.”

 

“And I don’t want to feel like no matter what is good in my life, I’ll always have this anger.”

 

Jaz lifts up on her knees so that she hovers over Adam. He can feel every place where her fingers skim his skin.

 

“I’m going to mess up,” she whispers as her fingers work the buttons of her shirt, “but I want to stop running; I want to love you well.”

 

Adam presses his mouth to her breast bone, and through the fabric of her bra, kisses her there. He whispers, “I want with you to be the one place where I don’t need to have all the right answers. But I’m gonna need you to push me sometimes to go there.”

 

“Like tonight?”

 

He laughs as his nose skims the side of her breast and he’s rewarded with the kind of sigh he wants to spend a lifetime collecting from Jaz Kahn.

 

The time for confessions has passed. Adam presses his fingers into the flesh of her thighs and it feels perfect, the curve and weight of her. He stands again, gathering Jaz in his arms.

 

She presses her lips to his neck and when her breath hot against his ear whispers, “Adam, if you need me to be any clearer, I want you to fuck me.” He stumbles.

 

Army captain. Super soldier sent around the world to rescue and disarm in the most strategically sensitive situations. Man not a boy. Still, Adam Dalton stumbles over his own feet when Jaz Kahn whispers, “Fuck me,” into his ear.

 

So he does.

 

She laughs at his stumble and he grunts as he puts his mouth to her breast through the fabric of her bra. They both shed their clothes, eyes meeting, grins widening, and from her he gets a whistle when he pulls off his pants. She swats at his backside and mutters something about bless the military. Adam is distracted by the way her breasts bounce when she laughs.

 

It’s different then their first time. Her hair is short so it doesn’t curtain them. There’s one angle that his back just isn’t going to tolerate. But the way her skin against his causes him to exhale and the way his cock bobs hard against his stomach just from the sight of her – none of that has changed. They tangle on the bed, fighting for domination in the slow, unhurried way of old lovers. His thoughts are fleeting, unformed sentences, cut short when she puts her mouth on him. She wraps her lips around his cock and Adam’s heels dig into the mattress.

 

“Fuck, baby,” he pleads and he is rewarded with a hum in her throat. She tilts her head and he slips further down her throat and it feels like perfection. She is so sweet and warm around him. “Jaz, fuck, honey you’re so good to me.”

 

Her fingers cup his balls and Adam closes his eyes because everything she is doing to him is so warm. He syncs his breathing with her gasps and when she opens her throat completely to him, Adam feels the tingling at the base of his spine.

 

“Babe, I need to be inside of you,” he gasps. “I need.”

 

She lifts off him with a _pop_.

 

Pride courses through Adam as she licks her lips satisfied by the taste of him. He rises up and cups Jaz’s jaw in his hand. He feels the power there. His fingers trace the line of her cheek bone. She is so precious and strong in the same skin. He gets to be the one to hold her. He gets to see her before the rest of the world does. _He_ is who she wants to spend the rest of her life running toward. That thought surges through Adam.

 

“Can I take you?” He presses the words against her skin.

 

“Yes.”

 

That is what he needs to let go. Adam rolls with Jaz in his arms. She ends up beneath him, but that isn’t what he has in mind.

 

“I’m going to take you unless you say stop,” he presses the words between kisses to her shoulder and then breast. He takes her nipple in his mouth and sucks. The arch in her back is everything. Her head goes limp and her fingers skitter across his back.

 

“ _Please_.” She stutters and the trust in that plea surges through him.

 

Adam leans back on his heels with Jaz pliant and wanting beneath him. He turns her over and she follows. It doesn’t take much to get her on board. He tugs on her hips until she’s on her knees and she rises to her palms with a whimper. He rains kisses down the length of her spine and she preens.

 

“You love me,” she grins wickedly over her shoulder. “Adam Dalton, you love me.”

 

His answer is to push into her where she’s wet and wanting. The hiss and then sigh that escape from her throat are worth it. He hovers there, their knees intertwined, the sweat on their legs making everything feel rightly precarious because it is. This love they are making – it’s _earned._ Adam pushes aside thought for feeling though. His toes ache as he pushes down into the mattress to bottom out inside Jaz. She groans as his thrusts stretch her and then there is the delicious arch of her back that changes the angle he’s hitting inside her.

 

“There, that’s where I need you,” she pants.

 

“Baby, say it again,” he stretches over her back and presses his lips to her shoulder blades.

 

She meets him thrust for thrust. He pushes up and she angles back. Adam’s hands interlace with her own so while he feels the power start in his own legs, pushing up into her warm, wet heat, he knows that it’s the two of them together. She is his counterpoint.

 

“Take me,” she breathes.

 

Adam Dalton is not a talker. He doesn’t use words when action speaks louder. But there’s something between them that unlocks him. When there’s no need to lead or to follow he’s able to just be.

 

“Look at you, taking me,” he whispers into her neck, “so tight and so good. You take my cock so well.”

 

“Yes,” Jaz pants.

 

“I feel you,” he says, “pulling me in. Milking me.”

 

She groans and then simultaneously they laugh together.

 

“Sex is so weird,” she giggles, “but you’re not wrong.” 

 

Adam presses a chaste kiss to her cheek, “Practically bovine.”

 

“Ad-am,” Jaz groans.

 

His hands slip over her own as Adam sets a new pace. The sound of skin slapping skin fills the rig and he loses himself in it. The curve of her is perfect and he gropes her breasts, skims his fingers over her slit, and kisses the sweaty curve of her neck. There’s a crick in his knees that he pushes aside. Right now, he just wants to come inside of her.

 

“What do you need?” he pants into the curve of her jaw.

 

“Harder. Harder.”

 

Adam quickens his pace and is rewarded with her shout of his name. Jaz’s head hangs low as she takes what he is doing to her. Over her shoulder, Adam steals a look of him sliding inside of her hot, warm heat. His cock is red and hard. She makes him this way, irrational and driven by want. There is no tactical advantage to this; with Jaz there is no strategic thinking. The fact settles into his heart:  she is his home. He changes the angle and she arches her back even more.

 

“Ugh,” she breathes and Adam gathers the pliant Jaz up in his arms. They raise up onto their knees. With a slow, deliberate push he thrusts up into her.

 

“Adam!” she shouts as her head lolls back onto his shoulder. He’s already felt her come once around him, but he’s greedy.

 

“Jasmine,” his teeth graze her pulse point, “you are _mine_.”

 

Adam Dalton has vowed to forever see the woman he loves as a soldier first, but buried in the innermost parts of her new words come to mind. This woman he is going to champion. He wants to be the behind-the-scenes to her success.  There’s some messy, undefined part of that that is sexual. He isn’t deluded; his dick isn’t a magic stick to make her awesome. It’s the dumbest, most basic thought he can have in the moment, but it strikes at something real in him. He desires to be part of who she is and it is a possessive desire, greedy and taking.

 

She’s granted him access just as he’s done the same for her. He wants to be the end of her day; the parts of herself she saves for after she’s taken off the uniform and the makeup. The muddled questions and unsure desires. He wants her taunting him in a romper while dancing with happy gay Latin men. He wants her championing young women like Leah and all the other girls she’s rescued through the scope of her sniper rifle. He wants all the messiness of her and he wants her – desperately, unequivocally – to love the messiness of him. His pride. His need to be challenged. His desire to fix what can’t be fixed.

 

“Jasmine, I want _you_.”

 

Those are his words as he empties himself into her. His balls contact and there is nothing but him coming inside her. She takes him with gasps and he kisses her between them. They collapse together into a puddle of limbs. He is spent. The sweat of their skin makes everything soft between him. He exhales as her lips trace his neck.

 

“Adam,” she whispers, “I want _you.”_

_***_

                                                                                

_Elijah,_

_You deserved so much more life and I’m trying to live it not just for you but for myself now. Today, Adam and I stood in front of Old Faithful and debated which dick joke you’d make if you were there with us as she spewed. Then we got back in the home you gave to me to build and drove to a grocery store to pick up $10 flowers to put into the damn vase you told me to buy. I got to thinking about something you said to me once about letting others love me; I get it now. You should know that. It just took a while for it to take root._

_I wish I could tell you the whole story; you’d love it…_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, THANK YOU for reading this story. I deeply, deeply appreciate it. It's been a joy to write it and doing so has reminded me how much I love putting words down onto a blank page. 
> 
> All the thanks to J, N, S, & L - their cheerleading and laughter has been such a sustaining quality in my life over this past year. (I'm posting a few days into 2019, but this show, our friendship, and this story are rooted in 2018 for me). I'm so thankful we became friends through The Brave. 
> 
> Please feel free to come say hello either at @kyrieanne on tumblr or @kyrieanneflails on twitter. I'd love to hear from you.


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